“…We focus on the banking sector because the recent debate in the literature suggests that EPU has some depressive effects on bank performance (Tran and Houston, 2021;Kim and Yasuda, 2021;Wang et al, 2022;Boungou and Mawusi, 2022). Existing studies show that bank profitability is affected by external economic factors such as monetary policy (Borio et al, 2017;Altavilla et al, 2018), the low interest rate environment (Bikker and Vervliet, Economic policy uncertainty and bank profit 803 JEL Classification -G21, G28, C53, E43, E52 2018), inflation (Tan and Floros, 2012), market structure (Mirzaei et al, 2013), bank credit supply (Ryoo, 2013), gross domestic product (GDP) growth (Bonaccorsi di Patti and Palazzo, 2020) and productivity (Batten and Vo, 2019), among others.…”