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...

We analyze comparative advantages/disadvantages of small and large banks in improving household sentiment regarding financial conditions. We match sentiment data from the University Of Michigan Surveys Of Consumers with local banking market data from 2000 to 2014. Surprisingly, the evidence...

Minority-owned banks have a mission to promote economic well-being in their communities. In particular, specialization in lending based on a central mechanism of shared-minority identity can yield an advantage in serving community needs through times of financial and economic crises. To test...