Assessing systemic risk of Islamic banks during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis

We examine the systemic risk (SR) of listed Islamic banks (IB) around the world for the 2005-2020 period. Our research hypothesis states that if IB are resilient to economic crises, we expect a stable pattern of SR for IB across pre- and during international crises. Our empirical results do not confirm this hypothesis. We find evidence that the SR of IB has increased sharply during the subprime and COVID-19 crises. Furthermore, we identify the presence of systematically important Islamic banks (SIIB). These results are robust to different measures of SR and do not depend on a specific region. These findings suggest that the Islamic banking system is vulnerable to downside risk and to the failure of SIIB.