Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...

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,...