Are Islamic Banks Really Islamic? Consequences on their Capital Ratios

In theory, Islamic banks are profit-and-loss-sharing (PLS) institutions. Nevertheless, literature shows that, in practice, Islamic banks rely mainly on mark-up financing techniques compared to a marginal share of PLS instruments. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Islamic banks intermediation model is not very different from the conventional banks model. First, we report pure and hybrid models to reflect the activities practiced by Islamic banks. Second, we show that Islamic banks use PLS arrangement at their liability side but mark-up financing techniques at their assets side. Islamic banks financing modes are driven by Mourabaha contract that represent almost 80% of their activities. Finally, we employ a sample of 656 banks – including 116 Islamic ones – to examine the impact of their preferred intermediation model and find that Islamic banks have higher capitalization in the form of risk-based and non-risk-based capital ratios than conventional counterparts.