Revisiting the Role of Bank’s Capital, Loan Loss Provisioning and Risky Assets to Credit Risk in Malaysia: An Application of Dynamic Heterogenous Panel Technique

The issue of credit risk among financial institutions has become de rigueur matter for many years particularly among risk managers, market players, regulators and academia in Malaysia. The negligence over specific credit risk factors in credit risk management could herald to the balance sheet loss as what happened in the US mortgage prime crisis. This paper is presented primarily to investigate the long run and short run relationship between credit risk and bank specific factors such as capital adequacy(CAR), loan loss provisioning(PROV) and risky assets (RWA) across different types of banks comprising Islamic banks, Islamic banking windows, commercial banks and investment banks in Malaysia. The application of heterogeneous panel model namely Pooled mean group (PMG) will allow for heterogeneity effect across non-homogenous banking operations. From our findings, it is evident that an increase in capital level reduces default problem for Islamic banking windows. Further, we find positive association between RWA and NPL and also between PROV and NPL which implies that loan loss provisioning could be important signal of risk taking behaviour. Besides that, our results also suggest that the nature of credit risk among Islamic banks in Malaysia are still following market force given by the fact that their credit risk management routines still follow the conventional practices.