We extend the literature on the effects of managerial entrenchment on capital structure to consider how safety-net subsidies and financial distress costs interact with managerial incentives to influence capital structure in U.S. commercial banking. Using cross-sectional data on publicly traded,...

Bank consolidation is a global phenomenon. It may enhance the value of firms in the industry if, for example, it is driven by scale and scope economies, but skeptics often accuse bankers of sacrificing value to build empires. Using data on bank holding companies in the U.S., we find strong...

We extend the literature on the effects of managerial entrenchment to consider how safety-net subsidies and financial distress costs interact with managerial incentives to influence capital structure in U.S. commercial banking. Using cross-sectional data on publicly traded, highest-level U.S....

An empirical model of managers' demand for agency goods is derived and estimated using the Almost Ideal Demand System of Deaton and Muellbauer (AER 1980). As in Jensen and Meckling (JFE 1976), we derive managers' demand for agency goods by maximizing a managerial utility function where managers...

This paper explores how to incorporate banks' capital structure and risk-taking into models of production. In doing so, the paper bridges the gulf between (1) the banking literature that studies moral hazard effects of bank regulation without considering the underlying microeconomics of...

Over the past two decades, a variety of deregulatory measures have increased competition in the U.S. commercial banking industry. While increased competitive rivalry creates incentives for banks to operate more efficiently, it also creates incentives for banks to take additional risk,...

We argue for a shift in the focus of modeling production from the traditional assumptions of profit maximization and cost minimization to a more general assumption of managerial utility maximization that can incorporate risk incentives into the analysis of production and recover value-maximizing...

We develop a novel technique to decompose banks' ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans into two components: first, a minimum ratio that represents best-practice lending given the volume and composition of a bank's loans, the average contractual interest rate charged on these loans, and...

We develop a novel technique to decompose banks' ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans into three components: first, a minimum ratio that represents best-practice lending given the volume and composition of a bank's loans, the average contractual interest rate charged on these loans, and...

We consider how size matters for banks in three size groups: banks with assets of less than $ 1 billion (small community banks), banks with assets between $ 1 billion and $ 10 billion (large community banks), and banks with assets between $ 10 billion and $ 50 billion (midsize banks). Community...