We show that around one third of executive directors on the boards of national supervisory authorities (NSA) in European banking have an employment history in the financial industry. The appointment of executives without a finance background associates with negative valuation effects....

Theoretically, bank's loan monitoring activity hinges critically on its capitalisation. To proxy for monitoring intensity, we use changes in borrowers' investment following loan covenant violations, when creditors can intervene in the governance of the firm. Exploiting granular bank-firm...

We study an environment where the capital structure of banks and firms are jointly determined in equilibrium, so as to balance the benefits of the provision of liquidity services by bank deposits with the costs of bankruptcy. The risk in the assets held by firms and banks is determined by the...