This study investigated bank-specific and macroeconomic determinants of bank profitability in Azerbaijan, an oil-dependent economy in transition. A huge drop in oil prices, a significant devaluation of the national currency, and the financial distress were the main motivations of the study. We applied Panel Generalized Method of Moments to the data in the framework of dynamic model of the bank profitability. It was found that bank size, capital, and loans, as well as economic cycle, inflation expectation, and oil prices were positively related to the profitability, whereas deposits, liquidity risk, and exchange rate devaluation were negatively associated with it. We further found that the bank profitability demonstrated moderate persistence and ignoring the country-specific features could lead to bias and poor performance in estimations. The conclusions of this research would aid in setting banking policies towards increasing profitability. This may be supplemented by ensuring strong research departments within the banks tasked with analyzing and forecasting the main macroeconomic indicators. The novel features of the study include utilizing recent economic trends, accounting for country-specific features, and for the first time, examining the effects of the economic cycle on the bank profitability in Azerbaijan. In addition, the study featured proper addressing time series properties of the panel data, and performances of robustness checks for consistency of results.

Abstract:We investigate non-oil sector effects of fiscal policy in Azerbaijan over a long time period in which a recent low oil prices sample is incorporated. To obtain robust empirical findings, we use different test and estimation methods as well as address small-sample bias issues in the extended production function framework. Results show that fiscal policy has a statistically significant positive impact on the non-oil sector both in the long and short run. However, the size of the impact is small compared to the findings of earlier studies due to, we believe, the low oil-price environment and different specifications used. Azerbaijani policymakers should take measures to compensate for the declining share of oil revenues in government revenues. They may consider increasing tax rates, import and export fees, energy and other tariffs as rapid remedies to fill the budget but these measures might hurt economic development. Alternative and less harmful remedies would be optimizing government spending, strongly monitoring ongoing projects, and phasing out social and infrastructure projects, which make lower contributions to growth. Our research opens the way for further investigation of this topic for the oil exporting economies in the future.