Commercial Bank Performance and Credit Risk in Albania

Abstract The banking sector is a complex system composed of a large number of stakeholders that interacts in a non-simple way continuously and which plays the key role in economic development of each country. The economies of developing countries like Albania are characterized by high demand for credit due to increasing investment. The revenues are even higher when the risk is greater. Of the high related risk, crediting leads to high returns. Credit risk is one of the most important types of risk in the banking sector that affect the bank performance, as it exhibits loss probability because of the failure of debtor to fulfill its obligations to bank. In June 2016, the level of non-performing loans in Albania appears in 24.4% of total loans, representing the major obstacle to the development and performance of the banking sector in Albania. The purpose of the estimable model outlined in this section is to capture the effects of macroeconomic, bank specific factors and Herfindahl-Hirschmann index (HHI) in the industry of bank performance. We also include a range of bank-specific variables that have been used in previous empirical studies that examine drivers of bank performance. A recent decline in revenue was observed due to higher provisioning expenses, which reduce banks' profits. To identify factors affecting bank profitability, we have got to study those factors like bank-specific (internal) factors, industry specific and macroeconomic (external) factors. The internal factors that influence profitability are expressed in terms of efficiency, productivity, competition, concentration, soundness, safety and profitability. Industry specific factor is market concentration, while macroeconomic factors are Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Inflation Rate, and Real effective exchange rate (REER). In this paper, we will test whether lending decisions of all banks operating in Albania exhibit moral hazard. The study carried out an empirical investigation of the quantitative effect of credit risk on the performance of 16 commercial banks in Albania organized quarterly over the period of 14 years (2002-2015)