According to a common narrative, in addition to inadequate capital and liquidity, the failure of banks in the financial crisis also reflected their poor governance. By governance we mean broadly the oversight that comes from banks' own shareholders and other stakeholders of the way in which they...

As a form of negative externality, a natural economic response to systemic risk is to look to taxation to correct it. However, we argue in this paper that the problem of systemic risk is not a standard externality problem. First, a 'polluter pays' approach is inapplicable because the polluter is...