A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

How can competition enhance bank soundness? Does competition improve soundness via the efficiency channel? Do banks heterogeneously respond to competition? To answer these questions, we exploit an innovative measure of competition [Boone, J., A New Way to Measure Competition, EconJnl, Vol. 118,...

Empirical studies provide evidence that bank capital ratios exceed regulatory requirements. But why do banks maintain capital levels above regulatory requirements? We use data for more than 2,600 banks from 10 European countries to test recent theories suggesting that competition incentivizes...

How do government interventions such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition? This question is important because the pricing of banking products has implications for consumer welfare. Exploiting data for 124 countries that...

We provide novel evidence that deposit competition incentivizes banks to securitize loans. Exploiting the state-specific removal of deposit market caps across the U.S. as an exogenous source of competition, we document a 7.1 percentage point increase in the probability that banks securitize...

We use data for more than 2,600 European banks to test whether increased competition causes banks to hold higher capital ratios. Employing panel data techniques, and distinguishing between the competitive conduct of small and large banks, we show that banks tend to hold higher capital ratios...

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,...