In the United States, on April 1, 2014, the set of rules commonly known as the Volcker Rule, prohibiting proprietary trading activities in banks, became effective. The implementation of this rule took more than three years, as proprietary trading is an inherently vague concept, overlapping...

This paper analyzes capital market reactions to international bank M&A. We investigate the combined stock return patterns of targets, bidders, and their peers upon takeover announcement, and closing or withdrawal. We distinguish five common M&A hypotheses and relate characteristic and mutually...

This paper investigates the relationship between the two major sources of bank default risk: liquidity risk and credit risk. We use a sample of virtually all U.S. commercial banks during the period 1998 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between these two risk sources on the bank...

This paper analyzes the influence a bank’s corporate governance structure has on its risk taking. To do so, the paper specifically looks at illiquidity and insolvency risk, as measured by a bank’s liquidity creation and its margin between interest income from loans and interest expenses on...

This paper analyzes the degree and type of private equity firm activism in portfolio companies. Using hand-collected data on 211 private equity investments over the period 1997-2009, we are able to distinguish between different kinds of activism of private equity firms such as board and...