Bank payouts divert cash to shareholders, while leaving behind riskier and less liquid assets to repay debt holders in the future. Bank payouts, therefore, constitute a type of risk-shifting that benefits equity holders at the expense of debt holders. In this paper, we provide insights on how...

We analyze how the structure of executive compensation affects the risk choices made by bank CEOs. For a sample of acquiring U.S. 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...

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the inadequacy of present supervisory arrangements to identify reliable ex-ante indicators of banking distress. For a sample of US bank holding companies, we analyse the extent to which distance to default based on market data can be explained using...