COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on Return on Asset and Financing of Islamic Commercial Banks: Evidence from Indonesia

The aim of this study is to propose appropriate models to forecast Return on Asset (ROA) and financing of Indonesia Islamic Commercial Banks during COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we study the models which involve reciprocal relation between ROA and financing and incorporate COVID-19 pandemic’s impact. It is crucial because the government would benefit from forecasting results to formulate the policy for the banks related to ROA and financing. We consider two models: Vector Autoregressive with exogenous variable (VARX) and spline regression, since both models are able to exploit the multivariate structure of ROA and financing and to include COVID-19 impact as predictor. The results show that the VARX outperforms spline regression in terms of RMSE. Using VARX, we deduce that ROA and financing have a positive reciprocal relationship, meaning that when ROA increases, financing would increase, and vice versa. In addition, the pandemic has significant impact on the decline of the ROA.We recommend that banks conduct an in-depth analysis to determine the appropriate form of restructuring for debtors so that it does not have a significant impact on the decrease in ROA.