We examine the extent to which regulations of entry and credit access are related to competition using data on 28 manufacturing sectors across 64 countries. A robust finding is that bureaucratic and costly entry regulations tend to hamper competition, as proxied by the price-cost margin, in the...

Bank-level panel data are used to test the effects on risk and returns, of market power, banking and bank-environment activities with respect to a total of 175 Islamic and conventional banks in 12 Middle Eastern countries. By incorporating the traditional SCP and the RMP hypotheses, I assess the...

In this paper, we evaluate stock performance of Islamic banks relative to their conventional counterparts during the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis (from December 31, 2019 to March 31, 2020). Using a total of 426 banks from 48 countries, we find that stock returns of Islamic banks were...