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...

Corporate governance of banks and other financial institutions differs considerably from general corporate governance. For financial institutions the scope of corporate governance goes beyond the shareholders (equity governance) to include debtholders, insurance policy holders and other...

We empirically investigate the role of country governance in the privatization of 113 government-owned banks from 1996 to 2007 across 39 countries. First, privatized banks tend to outperform non-privatized banks after the privatization, which is called the privatization effect. Second, we find...

This paper explores the advantages of a new financial charter for large, complex, internationally active financial institutions that would address the corporate governance challenges of such organizations, including incentive problems in risk decisions and the complicated corporate and...

We study the effects of the interplay between deregulation and governance on risk taking in the financial industry. We consider a large natural experiment in Spain where the removal of regulatory geographic constraints for savings banks led to a nationwide expansion of these banks during the...

The pandemic crisis has accelerated the entry of financial technology (“fintech”) firms into the banking industry. Some of the new fintech banks are owned or controlled by commercial enterprises. Affiliations between commercial firms and fintech banks raise fresh concerns about the dangers...

There has been a great deal of interest recently in understanding the potential role of fintech firms in expanding credit access to the underbanked and credit-constrained consumers. We explore the supply side of fintech credit, focusing on unsecured personal loans and mortgage loans. We...

We document that the dispersion of failure risk across banks within a given region in the U.S. is greater in regions that have higher income inequality. We explain this pattern with a model based on risk shifting incentives where banks issue insured deposits and choose the riskiness of their...