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,...

Excessive credit creation by banks was at the root of the recent financial crisis. Nevertheless, micro-prudential regulation lacks a clear methodology to identify these banks. Combining arguments from banking and auction theory, we show that overoptimism causes excessive lending, subsequently...

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...

We use a Diamond/Dybvig-based model with two banks operating in separate regions connected by a common asset market in which banks and sophisticated depositors invest. We study the effect of a potential run (crisis) and subsequent fire sales on the asset price in both the crisis and no-crisis...

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 integrate Basel II (and III) regulations into the industrial organization approach to banking and analyze the interaction between capital adequacy regulation and credit risk transfer with credit default swaps (CDS) including its effect on lending behavior and risk sensitivity of a...