This paper examines the pivotal role of Nicola Miraglia in steering the Banco di Napoli through a tumultuous period of economic crisis and institutional decay in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Miraglia undertook the daunting task of managing a bank on the brink of bankruptcy due to the...

The essay examines the commercial and financial activities of Palla Strozzi, a Florentine merchant active in Lyon in the first half of the 16th century. A cousin of the leaders of the Florentine republican movement - the brothers Piero, Roberto and Leone Strozzi, allies of France against duke...

We set up a simple theoretical model in which banks with varying degrees of government support are matched with CEOs that have different degrees of overconfidence. The channel through which the matching occurs is the share of bonus payments offered by banks in their profit-maximizing contracts....