“…The estimations are conducted at the bank-year level for an unbalanced panel of over 3,000 banks across 168 countries comprising advanced and emerging economies. This contrasts with prior research which focuses either on a limited sample of countries and banks (Dong and Oberson, 2021;Kim et al, 2020;Lopez-Espinosa et al, 2021;Pastiranov a and Witzany, 2022;Kund and Rugilo, 2023;Kyiu and Tawiah, 2023;Salazar et al, 2023) or have a within-country focus (Miah et al, 2018;Sharairi, 2018;Coffie and Bedi, 2019;Mardani et al, 2019;Gu, 2021).…”