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The recent expansion of Islamic banks raises questions on its economic implications. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of Islamic banking development on access to credit. We combine data from a unique hand-collected database that covers Islamic banks over the period of 2000 to 2005 with firm-level data covering developing and emerging countries. We find that Islamic banking development has overall no impact on credit constraints, while banking development and conventional banking development alleviate obstacles to financing. However Islamic banking development exerts a positive impact on access to credit when conventional banking development is low. Hence we support the view that Islamic banking does not overall alleviate obstacles to financing, but it can act as substitute to conventional banking.JEL Codes: G21, O16.

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This paper investigates whether long-term finance affects the firm entry across the world. We construct a new database on short-term and long-term credit provided by commercial banks to the private sector in 85 countries over the period 1995-2014. We then analyze whether differences in entrepreneurship are correlated with the provision of short-term and long-term bank credit. Data on entrepreneurship are extracted from two frequently used databases: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring dataset and Entrepreneurship Database, each of which captures different aspects of firm creation. Econometric results indicate that long-term credit does not stimulate the firm entry. On the contrary, we find that short-term credit exerts a positive impact at each stage of firm creation from activity birth to registration. Our findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests, including additional control variables, alternative dependent variables, alternative sample, and changes in econometric specification. Our findings suggest that better provision of short-term credit allows entrepreneurs to apply for a formal loan instead of relying exclusively on informal loans or internal funds, contrary to long-term loans.

In recent years, both microfinance institutions (MFIs) and banks across the world have been converging towards the financing of small enterprises with high financing needs. This paper scrutinizes whether banks and MFIs compete each other as a result of recent transformations in both industries. In doing so, we study whether the loan strategy of a microfinance institution is shaped by the local presence of a bank. Specifically, we investigate whether bank proximity influences loan conditions provided by one of the largest microfinance institutions in Madagascar. We employ an original panel dataset of 32,374 loans granted to 14,834 borrowers over the period 2008-2014. We find that the closer a bank is located to a given MFI borrower, the larger the loan obtained and the less collateral required. These results are insensitive to several robustness tests for possible endogeneity of distance, sample selection issue, and alternative specifications. In addition, findings are stronger for larger and more established (older) firms in line with our hypothesis.