In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission mandated that the chief executive officers of large, publicly traded firms certify the accuracy of their company financial statements. In this paper, I investigate whether CEO certification has had a measurable effect on the stock market valuation...

In moral hazard models, bank shareholders have incentives to transfer wealth from the deposit insurer - that is, maximize put option value - by pursuing riskier strategies. For safe banks with large charter value, however, the risk-taking incentive is outweighed by the possibility of losing...

I analyze the optimal design of banking supervision in the presence of cross-border lending. Cross-border lending could imply that an individual bank failure in one country could trigger negative spillover effects in another country. Such cross-border contagion effects could turn out to be...

Credit risk associated with interbank lending may lead to domino effects, where the failure of one bank results in the failure of other banks not directly affected by the initial shock. Recent work in economic theory shows that this risk of contagion depends on the precise pattern of interbank...

I present evidence that the cross-guarantee authority granted to the FDIC by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 has unexpectedly strengthened the Federal Reserve's source-of-strength doctrine. In particular, I find that a bank affiliated with a multi-bank...