Istanbul Sehir University, Istanbul

The Clash of Civilizations” thesis is the central theme in international relations today. How does one encounter such a conflict-ridden and divisive phenomenon? Is there any scientific way to investigate cultural diversity throughout the world while looking for universal human values and virtues? In other words, could worldwide cultural diversity be grounded upon a set of universal human values? From some recent scientific studies about human nature, it appears that there is surfacing a scholarly judgment of something called a common humanity.

Because of their opaque nature, SMEs are overly reliant on bank lending. Therefore, we examine whether banks' credit supply to SMEs are affected by their financial conditions. To this end, we employ a Granger causality analysis to examine whether there is an indication of a significant direction of determination between SME lending and non-performing SME loans. The results reveal no bidirectional relationship between SME lending and NPL for the entire banking sector.

We examine the interest rate sensitivity of both deposits and credits at Islamic and conventional banks in Turkey. We find that the bank lending channel is especially operative for Islamic banks. Impulse responses for conventional and Islamic banks reveal that Islamic bank depositors’ sensitivity to policy rate changes are substantially larger than that of conventional bank depositors.

This study investigates the behavioral aspects of Islamic bank depositors in a dual banking system. By categorizing depositors into groups based on the amount of their deposited funds, we estimate the responses of these groups to interest rate changes. We take the findings of conventional banks as a comparative baseline and investigate the extent to which the changes in different Islamic depositor groups differ from conventional depositor groups. The findings show that depositors in both Islamic and conventional banks respond to interest rate changes.