We use payroll data on 1.2 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sector to identify … document an economically significant correlation of incentive pay with both the level and volatility of bank trading income … share in the capital markets divisions with the strength of incentive pay in unrelated bank divisions like retail banking …

illiquid loans by issuing deposits. Deposit transfers across banks must be settled using central bank reserves. Transfers are …

from biases in the sample. Instead, they seem correlated with improvements in bank productivity. We conjecture that greater …

when they will want to eliminate their holding of a financial asset. Borrowers are concerned about liquidity because they … their investors. We show the bank has to have a fragile capital structure, subject to bank runs, in order to perform these … functions. Far from being an aberration to be regulated away, the funding of illiquid loans by a bank with volatile demand …

deposits excessively fragile in which case there is a role for outside bank capital. Greater bank capital reduces liquidity … creation by the bank but enables the bank to survive more often and avoid distress. A more subtle effect is that banks with … different amounts of capital extract different amounts of repayment from borrowers. The optimal bank capital structure trades …

This paper examines the use of credit derivatives by US bank holding companies from 1999 to 2003 with assets in excess … of one billion dollars. Using the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Bank Holding Company Database, we find that in 2003 … represent on average two thirds of the assets of bank holding companies with assets in excess of $1 billion. Few banks are net …