Managers' incentives may conflict with those of shareholders or creditors, particularly at leveraged, opaque banks. Bankers may abuse their control rights to give themselves excessive salaries, favored access to credit, or to take excessive risks that benefit themselves at the expense of...

I exploit variation in the adoption of disclosure and supervisory regulation across U.S. states to examine their impact on the development and stability of commercial banks. The empirical results suggest that the adoption of state‐level requirements to report financial statements in local...

Managers' incentives may conflict with those of shareholders or creditors, particularly at leveraged, opaque banks. Bankers may abuse their control rights to give themselves excessive salaries, favored access to credit, or to take excessive risks that benefit themselves at the expense of...

Clearinghouses were private organizations that not only had the power to audit member banks’ balance sheets and levy fines, but also provided emergency liquidity during large-scale financial panics. This paper studies how clearinghouses affected bank composition and solvency during stable...

Scholars have studied the U.S. banking systems of the late 19th century, but the presence and influence of mutual savings banks has largely gone unexamined. A new annual database of New England banks shows that mutual savings banks had a significant presence in the postbellum banking system....

In Japan, since 2013, Japanese corporate governance reform has been developed by Japanese Government initiatives. This paper provides a theoretical framework for understanding what Japanese corporate governance reform means for Japanese companies by an application of agency theory. Corporate...

Part B. of the paper compares the basic concepts of shareholder control in Anglo-America and some states of Continental Europe. It introduces a new categorization between Implicit and Explicit Systems of Corporate Control. The first category refers to statutes that are enacted and construed with...

The diversity of voting rules in today's corporations indicates that power is distributed among shareholders in a great variety of ways, but current theories of the corporation have little to say about this diversity. For insight into the significance of different ways of distributing power...

Governance at banks, especially major banks, requires further reform, especially with respect to incentives. Supervisors are concerned that incentives may make executives prone to take “excessive” risks. Shareholders are concerned that banks rarely earn their cost of capital.What's needed is...

A great merger wave occurring in the United States between 1897 and 1903 was the single most important event in a process that yielded the pattern of managerial control and dispersed share ownership which currently distinguishes America's corporate economy from arrangements in most other...