This paper investigates what factors determine whether a commercial banker joins the board of a non-financial firm and how a banker on the board affects the firm. We consider the trade off between the benefits of bank monitoring to the firm and the costs to the bank of becoming actively involved...

This paper provides a positive political economy analysis of deregulation, focusing on the recent removal of barriers to bank branching. Intra- and inter- state branching restrictions had been in place in most states for more than a century but have largely disappeared during the last 25 years....