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Syazwani Kepli · Yasmin Bani · Anitha Rosland · Nisful Laila ·International Journal of Economics and Management ·2021 ·JEL: G21, E44

Financial institutions like commercial banks play important role in the financial system by helping countries to grow and provide capital and platform for investors. However, banks need to be able to generate income in their lending business and perform efficiently. Nonperforming loans (NPLs) is one of the tools to determine the efficiency of lending institutions in which reflect the quality of the credit portfolio as well as the health of the banking sector. High levels of NPLs in the banking system places the banks in risky situation which may lead to limited financial activities and consequently lower investment and growth. Motivated by this scenario, this study examines the determinants of NPLs in the Malaysian banking system. Using annual data from 1988 to 2018, the study estimates the short and long-run dynamics of several determinants using the Auto-Regressive Distribution Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach. The empirical results demonstrate mixed results. In the long-run, exchange rate is positive and significantly related to non-performing loans, while industrial production and money supply are negative and significant. However, inflation does not have significant effect on NPLs in Malaysia. The findings of this study is useful in assisting the banking institutions and policy makers to design macro and fiscal policies.

Dung V. Dinh · Robert J. Powell · Duc H. Vo ·Journal of Asian Economics ·2021 ·JEL: G33, G28

This study is conducted to investigate the prediction of corporate financial distress based on the Merton (1974) market-based Distance to Default (DD) model over the period from 1997 to 2016 which covers a range of economic financial circumstances, including the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) and Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The study focusses on the six largest countries in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), comprising of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unlike previous studies which focus mainly on bankruptcy, this paper focusses on early warning distress indicators that signal distress well before bankruptcy. This is when firms experience difficulty in servicing debt as measured by interest coverage ratio (ICR) at a firm level and non-performing loans (NPLs) at a country level. Key empirical findings from this paper indicate that the market-based distance-to-default (DD) model is generally a good early warning indicator of financial distress in the following year, particularly for ICR, but that prediction accuracy varies between individual countries in the Southeast Asian region.