In this paper, we explore whether economic uncertainty differently affects the default risk of Islamic and conventional banks. Using a sample of 568 banks from 20 countries between 2009 and 2018, we use the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) by Ahir et al. (2018) to conduct a study based on a comparable measure across countries. Our findings indicate that economic uncertainty increases the default risk of conventional banks but does not affect Islamic banks’ default risk. To understand why, we explore the influence of religiosity, institutional factors, and bank-level heterogeneity. We observe that Islamic banks’ default risk is not significantly affected by uncertainty in all types of countries, but such a difference with conventional banks mainly holds for banks with higher income diversification, larger size, and that are publicly traded. Moreover, our findings show that conventional banks suffer more from uncertainty in terms of stability in countries with higher religiosity and with a higher share of profit-loss sharing (PLS) contracts. Our results are robust to alternative estimation techniques to deal with endogeneity and to alternative variable measurements.

在本文中，我们探讨了经济不确定性对伊斯兰银行和传统银行违约风险的影响是否不同。使用 2009 年至 2018 年间来自 20 个国家的 568 家银行的样本，我们使用了 Ahir 等人的世界不确定性指数 (WUI)。（2018 年）进行一项基于各国可比措施的研究。我们的研究结果表明，经济不确定性会增加传统银行的违约风险，但不会影响伊斯兰银行的违约风险。为了理解其中的原因，我们探讨了宗教信仰、制度因素和银行层面异质性的影响。我们观察到，伊斯兰银行的违约风险在所有类型的国家都没有受到不确定性的显着影响，但与传统银行的这种差异主要存在于收入多样化程度更高、规模更大、公开交易的银行。而且，我们的研究结果表明，在宗教信仰较高和损益分享 (PLS) 合同份额较高的国家，传统银行在稳定性方面遭受的不确定性更大。我们的结果对于处理内生性的替代估计技术和替代变量测量是稳健的。