The goal of integrated risk management in a financial institution is to measure and manage risk and capital across a range of diverse business activities. This requires an approach for aggregating risk types (market, credit, and operational) whose distributional shapes vary considerably. In this...

Remarks at the OpRisk North America Annual Conference, New York City.

In moral hazard models, bank shareholders have incentives to transfer wealth from the deposit insurer--that is, maximize put option value--by pursuing riskier strategies. For safe banks with large charter value, however, the risk-taking incentive is outweighed by the possibility of losing...

The naming of eleven banks as "too big to fail (TBTF)" in 1984 led bond raters to raise their ratings on new bond issues of TBTF banks about a notch relative to those of other, unnamed banks. The relationship between bond spreads and ratings for the TBTF banks tended to flatten after that event,...

The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about the governance of banks. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing board governance using a sample of banking firm data that spans forty years. We examine the relationship between board structure (size and...

The moral hazard problem associated with deposit insurance generates the potential for excessive risk taking on the part of bank owners. The banking literature identifies franchise value -- a firm’s profit-generating potential -- as one force mitigating that risk taking. We argue that in the...

A central issue currently debated among bank analysts and economists is whether mergers enhance the efficiency of surviving banks. This paper investigates the postmerger performance of acquiring banks that participated in a merger during 1980-90. The evidence suggests that acquiring banks failed...

The largest U.S. commercial banks are currently in the process of restructuring their retail operations. This paper describes the innovations that are being adopted, explains the integrated strategies for restructuring, and reviews the policy issues that emerge. We find that banks are...

This paper shows that bank performance improves significantly after restrictions on bank expansion are lifted. We find that profits increase and loan quality improves after states permit statewide branching, and--to a lesser extent--after states allow interstate banking. The improvements...

The moral hazard problem associated with deposit insurance generates the potential for excessive risk taking on the part of bank owners. The banking literature identifies franchise value--a firm's profit-generating potential--as one force mitigating that risk taking. We argue that in the...