Allen N. Berger Bücher

Provides an overview and analysis of developments and research in banking written by leading researchers in the field.

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age, gender, and education jointly affect the variability of bank performance. Second, we use difference-in-difference estimations that focus exclusively on mandatory executive retirements and find that younger executive teams increase risk taking, as do board changes that result in a higher proportion of female executives. In contrast, if board changes increase the representation of executives holding Ph. D. degrees, risk taking declines.

Social capital theory predicts individuals establish social ties based on homophily, i.e., affinities for similar others. We exploit a unique sample to analyze how similarities and social ties affect career outcomes in banking based on age, education, gender, and employment history to examine if homophily and connectedness increase the probability that the appointee to an executive board is an outsider (an individual without previous employment at the bank) compared to being an insider. Our results show that homophily based on age and gender raises the chance of the successful candidate being an outsider, whereas similar educational backgrounds reduce the chance that the appointee comes from outside. When we examine performance effects, we find weak evidence that social ties are associated with reduced profitability. -- Social networks ; executive careers ; banking ; corporate governance

Liquidity creation is one of banks' raisons d'être. But what happens to liquidity creation and risk taking when a bank is identified as distressed by regulatory bodies and subjected to regulatory interventions and/or receives capital injections? What are the long-run effects of such interventions? To address these questions, we exploit a unique dataset of German universal banks for the period 1999 - 2008. Our main findings are as follows. First, regulatory interventions and capital injections are followed by lower levels of liquidity creation. The probability of a decline in liquidity creation increases to up to around 50 percent when such actions are taken. Second, bank risk taking decreases in the aftermath of regulatory interventions and capital injections. Third, while banks' liquidity creation market shares decline over the five years following such disciplinary measures, they also reduce their risk exposure over this period to become safer banks. -- Liquidity creation ; bank distress ; regulatory interventions ; capital injections