We examine the effects of opacity on bank valuation and the synchronicity of bank equity prices over the years 2000-2006 prior to the 2007 financial crisis. Investments in opaque assets are more profitable than transparent assets, and controlling for profitability, have larger valuation...

The impact of cross-border bank M&As on bank risk remains an open question. Though geographically diversifying bank M&As have the potential to reduce the risk of bank insolvency, they also have the potential to increase that risk due to the increase in risk-taking incentives for bank managers...

Using a large sample of the Chinese public firms, this study documents that the government intervention via state ownership can mitigate the stock crash risk. The mitigation effect of state ownership is more pronounced in the crisis periods and in the sample of firms with shares held by central...

This paper gives an overview over corporate governance and banking regulation in Germany. Particular attention is put on legal and regulatory changes that were made in response to the financial market crisis. The paper shows that the changes mainly focus on the remuneration of managers and on...

In this paper, we analyse whether bank owners or bank managers were the driving force behind the risks incurred in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. We show that owner controlled banks had higher profits in the years before the crisis, and incurred larger losses and were more likely...

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,...

The paper investigates how management board composition of banking institutions impacts their risk-taking behavior in the Czech Republic. More specifically, we examine the effect of average director age, proportion of female directors, non-national directors and proportion of their attained...

The goal of this paper is to provide alternative approaches to generate indexes in order to assess banking distress. Specifically, we focus on two groups of indexes that are based on the signalling approach and on the zero in ated Poisson models. The results show that the indexes based on these...

We analyze how the structure of executive compensation affects the risk choices made by bank CEOs. For a sample of acquiring US banks, we employ the Merton distance to default model to show that CEOs with higher pay-risk sensitivity engage in risk-inducing mergers. Our findings are driven by two...

Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...