Failure in bank corporate governance has been seen as a contributing factor to excessive risk-taking pre-crisis with devastating implications as risks realised during the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on the impact of managerial incentives on bank crisis performance is scarce. Moreover, bank strategy has not previously been accounted for. Hence, this paper presents nov...

Standard banking theory suggests that there exists an optimal level of credit risk that yields maximum bank profit. We identify the optimal level of risk-weighted assets that maximizes banks’ returns in the full sample of US banks over the period 1996–2011. We find that this optimal level is cyclical for the average bank, being higher than the realized credit risk in relatively stable periods w...

Article history: Received 11 December 2008 Received in revised form 25 August 2009 Accepted 21 September 2009 Available online 15 October 2009 Using data from prewar Japan, this paper investigates the impact of a liquidity shock induced by depositors' behavior on bank portfolio management during financial crises in a system lacking deposit insurance. It is found that banks reacted to the liquid...

We calculate abnormal stock returns for Japanese non-financial companies around major events associated with the banking crisis (1995–2000), and find that not all companies were equally sensitive to the malaise of the banking sector: the most affected were small, leveraged, low-tech companies with low credit ratings and low market to book ratios. This is consistent with ‘‘credit crunch’’ theori...

This paper estimates a structural demand model for commercial bank deposit services in order to measure the effects on consumers given dramatic changes in bank services throughout US branching deregulation in the 1990s. Following the discrete choice literature, consumer decisions are based on prices and bank characteristics. Consumers are found to respond to deposit rates, and to a lesser exten...

We examine the effect of house price appreciation on bank loan portfolios during the 1996—2006 period. While most previous research in this area has concentrated on loan demand effects, we evaluate how house prices affect a bank’s credit supply. Controlling for possible simultaneity between house prices and bank loan portfolio growth, we find that banks affected by greater house price appreciat...

Since 1990, federal bank supervisors have announced formal enforcement actions publicly. The change in regime provides a natural laboratory to test two propositions: (1) claims by economists that putting confidential supervisory information in the public domain will enhance market discipline and (2) claims by bank supervisors that releasing such data will spark runs. To evaluate these propositi...

This paper utilises the non-parametric frontier approach, DEA, to analyse the technical and scale efficiency in Japanese banking using a recent cross –section sample. Efficiency analysis is conducted across individual banks, bank types and bank size groups. Following Berger and Humphrey (1997), problem loans are controlled for as an exogenous influence on bank efficiency. Powerful size-efficien...

Article history: Received 30 May 2011 Received in revised form 7 November 2011 Accepted 20 December 2011 Available online 29 December 2011 We investigate bank risk taking, efficiency and their relation to law enforcement using a unique sample of 133 Chinese city commercial banks across 31 regions for the 1999–2008 period. We find that stronger law enforcement tends to promote greater bank risk ...

A model of a dependent central bank that internalizes the government’s budget constraint is used to examine the optimal composition of the euro zone. The model embodies the desire to stimulate output and to provide monetary financing to governments. Unable to pre-commit to first-best policies, the central bank produces excess inflation — a tendency partially reduced in a monetary union. On the ...