Assuming a Pareto-type distribution of bank sizes, we investigate the effect of changes in Zipf's exponent ([alpha]) and the sample size on the behavior of different concentration indices, such as the 3-bank concentration ratio, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and the top 5%-concentration ratio....

This paper investigates the abnormal share return dispersion occurring when companies announce their interim or final earnings. Whereas, prior research has focused on abnormal returns, little attention has been given to investigating the dispersion of the abnormal returns. We find strong...

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,...

Little is known about how the demographic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we investigate how age, gender, and educational composition of executive teams affect the portfolio risk of financial institutions. Using...

The recent financial turmoil and bailouts of a large number of banks have raised substantial policy concerns regarding banks that are considered Too-systemically-important-to-fail (TSITF). In this paper, we exploit a sample of bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between 1997 and 2008 in nine EU...

Social capital theory predicts individuals establish social ties based on homophily, i.e., affinities for similar others. We exploit a unique sample to analyze how similarities and social ties affect career outcomes in banking based on age, education, gender, and employment history to examine if...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients' security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth shocks,...

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,...

Using the Panzar and Rosse H-statistic as a measure of competition in 45 countries, we find that more competitive banking systems are less prone to experience a systemic crisis and exhibit increased time to crisis. This result holds even when we control for banking system concentration, which is...

A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....