Islamic financial institutions have relied for decades on margin-based contracts to provide financing for the business sector, despite the basic idea that Islamic finance is expected to provide an equity-based or a profit and loss sharing (PLS) contract. This fact raises the need to encourage...

The lack of funding available from the financial sector for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is known as the "financing gap". This timely report analyses this gap for both credit and equity financing and seeks to determine how prevalent such a gap may be, both among OECD countries and...

We analyze the relationship between bank size and risk-taking under the New Basel Capital Accord. Using a model with imperfect competition and moral hazard, we show that the introduction of an internal ratings based (IRB) approach improves upon flat capital requirements if the approach is...