This paper investigates the effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance using data on Chinese banks during the 1996-2006 period. We construct a new measure, economies of diversi-fication, and compare the results to those of the more conventional focus indices, which are based on...

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age,...

How does asset encumbrance affect the fragility of intermediaries subject to rollover risk? We offer a model in which a bank issues covered bonds backed by a pool of assets that is bankruptcy remote and replenished following losses. Encumbering assets allows a bank to raise cheap secured debt...

We develop an operational model of information contagion and show how it may be integrated into a mainstream, top-down, stress-testing framework to quantify systemic risk. The key transmission mechanism is a two-way interaction between the beliefs of secondary market investors and the...

Cyber attacks can impair banks operations and precipitate bank runs. When digital infrastructure is shared, banks defend themselves by investing in cybersecurity but can free-ride on the security measures of others. Ex ante free-riding by banks interacts with the ex post coordination frictions...

Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...

This paper investigates the effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance using data on Chinese banks during the 1996-2006 period. We construct a new measure, economies of diversification, and compare the results to those of the more conventional focus indices, which are based on...