The impact of Macroeconomic and Microeconomic variables on Credit Risk: A Comparative Study between Retail and Corporate Credit Risks in the banks of Egypt

In 2018, corporate credit risk had notably increased in the Egyptian banking industry because its nonperforming loan (NPL) ratios had reversed the downward sloping curve shaping upward ones while the retail NPL ratio struggled the reverse, shaping a flat curve. In the present work, the paper aims to study the macroeconomic and microeconomic factors of corporate and retail credit risk to develop customized models that better predict the future value of the credit risk in the banks of Egypt to provide better insight to the credit officers and regulators to help in enhancing their credit decisions and regulations.
The paper has utilized the Fixed-Random effects regression models for data analysis using panel data from 2013 to 2020. The findings showed that the macroeconomic and bank-specific variables affect the corporate and retail credit risks differently showing the importance of dividing the credit risk into categories to avoid generating misleading results and to create more robust and accurate predictive models of credit risk. The results also revealed that asset size, income diversification, loan-to-deposit ratio, interest rate, and external debt significantly affect corporate credit risk. In contrast, retail credit risk is affected only by macroeconomic variables such as external debt, GDP, interest rate, and foreign direct investment.