This paper proposes a new regulatory approach that implements capital requirements contingent on managerial compensation. We argue that excessive risk taking in the financial sector originates from the shareholder moral hazard created by government guarantees rather than from corporate...

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Strikingly high bank leverage emerges naturally from the interplay between two sets of forces. First, seniority and diversification reduce bank asset volatility by an order of magnitude relative to that of...

This paper proposes a new regulatory approach that implements capital requirements contingent on executive incentive schemes. We argue that excessive risk-taking in the financial sector originates from the shareholder moral hazard created by government guarantees rather than from corporate...

This paper investigates bank portfolio composition under Basel II where the amount of required capital is determined by bank's own risk assessment. We particularly show that in presence of asymmetric information between the bank and the supervisor, it has incentives to understate its risk taking...

This paper justifies, in an agency context, the existence of hybrid securities appeared very recently on the organized market: the cocos (contingent convertible bonds). Like the straight debt, they make it possible to profit from tax benefits of debt. And, like stocks, they provide protection...

This paper explores the effect of taxation on the capital structure of banks. For identification, we exploit exogenous regional variations in the rate of the Italian tax on productive activities (IRAP) using administrative, confidential data on regional banks provided by the Bank of Italy...

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms' leverage carry over to banks,...

We examine the effects of the recently introduced regulatory leverage ratio, which aims to backstop existing risk-weighted capital requirements, on banks' balance sheets. We observe on average a deleveraging process, while banks simultaneously increase their risk-weighted assets. Having less...

Do heightened capital requirements impose private costs on banks by adversely affecting their cost of capital? And if so, does the effect differ across different groups of banks? Using an international sample of listed banks over the period from 1990 to 2017, I find that equity investors adjust...

Traditional capital structure theory predicts that reducing banks' leverage reduces the risk and cost of equity but does not change the weighted average cost of capital, and thus the rates for borrowers. We confirm that the equity of better-capitalized banks has lower beta and idiosyncratic...