Does COBIT Framework Adoption Influence Banks’ Financial Stability? Evidence from an Emerging Country

This paper assesses how the adoption of the COBIT framework is associated with the financial stability of commercial banks in an emerging economy—Jordan. As banks rely increasingly on digital technology, the management of technological risk has become central to their soundness, raising the question of how IT governance is associated with bank-level risk. Using a panel of 12 listed Jordanian commercial banks over 2014–2023, we estimate the relationship between COBIT adoption and stability, measured by the natural logarithm of the Z-score, employing a random-effects panel model. We construct two original, text-based measures of COBIT engagement from banks’ annual reports: a disclosure-frequency count (COBITF) and a binary adoption indicator (COBITD). The results show that COBIT engagement is positively associated with bank stability, whereby a one-unit rise in disclosure frequency is associated with an increase in the Z-score of roughly 2.2%, and the association is robust to the inclusion of bank-specific and macroeconomic controls and to a two-stage least-squares (2SLS) treatment of endogeneity for COBITF. The findings are presented as conditional associations with a plausible governance channel. The study contributes replicable, longitudinal measures of IT-governance engagement for data-scarce emerging markets and offers empirical evidence that engagement with a specific IT-governance framework is positively associated with bank stability.