Aggregate prudential ratios have become a mainstay of financial stability analysis. But how reliable are these indicators when it comes to distinguishing between strong and weak banking systems? We address this issue by analyzing the performance of aggregate prudential ratios in systemic banking...

Integrated agencies supervising banks, nonbank financial institutions, and securities markets have been gaining popularity around the globe. Using a unique data set on compliance with international standards in 84 countries, we find that greater supervisory integration is associated with higher...

Motivated by the liberalisation and harmonisation of financial systems in Europe, we investigate whether the observed shift into non-interest income activities improves performance of small European credit institutions. Using a sample of 755 small banks for the period 1997–2003, we find no...

Assuming a Pareto-type distribution of bank sizes, we investigate the effect of changes in Zipf's exponent ([alpha]) and the sample size on the behavior of different concentration indices, such as the 3-bank concentration ratio, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and the top 5%-concentration ratio....

Little is known about how the demographic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we investigate how age, gender, and educational composition of executive teams affect the portfolio risk of financial institutions. Using...

In this paper, we examine the systemic risk implications of banking institutions that are considered ‘Too-systemically-important-to-fail’ (TSITF). We exploit a sample of bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in nine EU economies between 1997 and 2007 to capture safety net subsidy effects and...

We exploit a unique data set of executive turnovers in community banks to test the micro-mechanisms of discipline by examining the monitoring and influencing role of different stakeholders. We find executives are more likely to be dismissed in risky institutions. Examining the roles of...