Banking law appears to limit the available pool of qualified directors. This study finds - in contrast to nonfinancial firms - a negative relation between abnormal returns and the proportion of independent outside directors on the board of directors of bidding banks.

Using the concept of Granger causality, interdependencies among the stock market indices for four Nordic countries and the United States are examined. The vector autoregressive model results indicate that the U.S. market affected only the Danish, but not the Norwegian, Finnish, or Swedish...