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,...

We use a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to analyse the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The study population are loan appli-cants that would normally have just been rejected based on regular screening. We find that access to credit allowed borrowers to...

Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...

The pattern of financial linkages is important in many areas of banking and finance. Yet bilateral linkages are often unknown, and maximum entropy serves as the leading method for estimating unobserved counterparty exposures. This paper proposes an efficient alternative that combines...

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 develop a model of bank risk-taking with strategic sovereign default risk. Domestic banks invest in real projects and purchase government bonds. While an increase in bond purchases crowds out profitable investments, it improves the government's incentives to repay and therefore lowers its...

We exploit proprietary information on severed correspondent banking relationships - due to the stricter enforcement of financial crime regulation - to assess how payment disruptions impede cross-border trade. Using firm-level export data from emerging Europe, we show that when local respondent...

How do real interest rates affect financial fragility? We study this issue in a model in which bank borrowing is subject to rollover risk. A bank’s optimal borrowing trades off the benefit from investing additional funds into profitable assets with the cost of greater risk of a run by bank...