The idealization of neuronal pulses as δ-spikes is a convenient approach in neuroscience but can sometimes lead to erroneous conclusions. We investigate the effect of a finite pulse width on the dynamics of balanced neuronal networks. In particular, we study two populations of identical excitatory and inhibitory neurons in a random network of phase oscillators coupled through exponential pulses with different widths. We consider three coupling functions inspired by leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with delay and type I phase-response curves. By exploring the role of the pulse widths for different coupling strengths, we find a robust collective irregular dynamics, which collapses onto a fully synchronous regime if the inhibitory pulses are sufficiently wider than the excitatory ones. The transition to synchrony is accompanied by hysteretic phenomena (i.e., the co-existence of collective irregular and synchronous dynamics). Our numerical results are supported by a detailed scaling and stability analysis of the fully synchronous solution. A conjectured first-order phase transition emerging for δ-spikes is smoothed out for finite-width pulses.