In many instances, “independently-minded” top-ranking executives canimpose strong discipline on their CEO, even though they are formally underhis authority. This paper argues that the use of such a disciplining mechanismis a key feature of good corporate governance.We provide robust...

We show that the cash-flow exposure of banks to interest rate risk, or income gap, affects the transmission of monetary policy shocks to bank lending and real activity. We first use a large panel of U.S. banks to show that the sensitivity of bank profits to interest rates increases significantly...

The correlation across US states in house price growth increased steadily between 1976 and 2000. This paper shows that the contemporaneous geographic integration of the US banking market, via the emergence of large banks, was a primary driver of this phenomenon. To this end, we first...