Enforcement actions (or sanctions) pursue two complementary goals, namely to penalize guilty companies and to provide an example to other companies that bad behaviour will be penalized. Although the recent financial crisis showed that this topic is critical in banking, only a few papers (e.g....

Failures of banks' governance and risk management functions have been identified as key causes of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This article reviews the empirical literature that investigates the relationship between governance structures and risk management functions as well as their impact...

We study the influence of unsecured debt (subdebt) and of bail-in debt on banks' risk-taking in a contingent claim model, while considering the bargaining between stockholders and debtholders. We show that replacing stock with subdebt: (1) leads to fewer risk-shifting events, but generates a...

This paper examines whether the systemic risk of financial institutions is associated with the risk-taking incentives generated by executive compensation. We measure managerial risk-taking incentives with the sensitivities of chief executive officer (CEO) and chief financial officer (CFO)...

Recent regulatory proposals tie a financial institution's systemic importance to its complexity. However, little is known about how complexity affects banks' risk management. Using the 1996-1999 deregulations of U.S. banks' nonbanking activities as a natural experiment, we show that banks'...

Does additional shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,400 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. We find that additional shareholder liability reduced bank failure...

The recent crisis has shown that systemically relevant banks in distress are likely to benefit from governmental support. This reduces their downside risk and leads to moral hazard, i.e. to incentives for these banks to assume excessive risks. In this paper we show empirically that implicit...

This paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...

This paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of loan growth and business model on bank risk in 15 EU countries. In contrast to the literature, we include a large number of unlisted banks in our sample which represent the majority of banks in the EU. We show that banks with high rates of loan growth are...