We propose a theory of regulatory arbitrage by banks and test it using trust preferred securities (TPS) issuance. From 1996 to 2007, U.S. banks in the aggregate increased their regulatory capital through issuance of TPS while their net issuance of common stock was negative due to repurchases. We...

This paper examines how governance and risk management affect risk-taking in banks. It distinguishes between good risks, which are risks that have an ex ante private reward for the bank on a stand-alone basis, and bad risks, which do not have such a reward. A well-governed bank takes the amount...

From 2010 to 2012, the relation between bank stock returns from European Union (EU) countries and the returns on sovereign CDS of peripheral (GIIPS) countries is negative. We use days with tail sovereign CDS returns of peripheral countries to identify the effects of shocks to the cost of...

We estimate holdings of highly-rated tranches of mortgage securitizations of American deposit-taking banks ahead of the credit crisis and evaluate hypotheses that have been advanced to explain these holdings. We find that holdings of highly-rated tranches were economically trivial for the...

Many observers have argued that credit default swaps contributed significantly to the credit crisis. Of particular concern to these observers are that credit default swaps trade in the largely unregulated over-the-counter market as bilateral contracts involving counterparty risk and that they...

We investigate whether bank performance during the credit crisis of 2008 is related to CEO incentives and share ownership before the crisis and whether CEOs reduced their equity stakes in their banks in anticipation of the crisis. There is no evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were...

We investigate whether a bank's performance during the 1998 crisis, which was viewed at the time as the most dramatic crisis since the Great Depression, predicts its performance during the recent financial crisis. One hypothesis is that a bank that has an especially poor experience in a crisis...