Our goal is to document the causal impact of having a board-level risk committee (RC) and a management-level executive designated as chief risk officer (CRO) on bank risk. The Dodd Frank Act requires bank holding companies with over $10 billion of assets to have an RC, while those with over $50...

Conventional wisdom on bank diversification confuses risk with failure. This article clarifies the distinction and shows how increasing bank size may increase bank risk, even though it lessens the probability of failure and lowers the expected loss. The key result is an application of...

We document the impact of having a risk committee (RC) and a chief risk officer (CRO) on bank risk using the passage of the Dodd Frank Act as a natural experiment. The Act requires bank holding companies with over $10B of assets to have an RC to oversee risk management, while those with over...

In the standard solution to the principal–agent problem, a risk-neutral agent bears all the risk. The author shows that, in fact, multiple solutions exist, and often the risk-neutral agent is not the sole bearer of risk. As risk aversion approaches zero, the unique risk-averse solution...

A study that demonstrates multiple equilibria in a class of principal-agent models and that examines the convergence properties of contracts as risk aversion approaches zero.