We examine how the information environment influences bank regulatory monitoring. Using the distance between banks and regulatory field offices as a proxy for information asymmetry, we show that an increase in distance reduces the quality of financial reporting. To establish causality, we use a...

Beginning June 2015, several U.S. Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) have been newly classified as small banks by regulators, thus benefiting from a friendlier regulatory environment. We exploit this decrease in regulation in a difference-in-differences setting to show that less regulation on small...

There is a paucity of research on the impact of domestic M&As on bank risk profiles. This paper exploits a rich database of Spanish banks during 1986-2010 to study the changes in bank risk profiles immediately before and after domestic M&As. Our results control for potential selection bias and...

Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size (measured as a bank's liabilities divided by national GDP) are linked to banks displaying higher tail risk. This effect is not entirely due to risk channels that disproportionately...

We show that compensation and other manager characteristics that attract public scrutiny in the banking industry only describe a small amount of the heterogeneity in the business models of banks. Instead, idiosyncratic manager effects that cannot be explained by observable manager...

This paper studies the impact of European bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on changes in key safety and soundness measures of both targets and acquirers.Our focus is on the short term impact after completion of the deal. We find a consistent, strong tendency towards post-merger mean reversion...