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...

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...

The specific monitoring effect of boards of directors versus industry regulation is unclear. In this paper, we examine how the interaction between bank-level monitoring and regulatory regimes influences the announcement period returns of acquiring banks in the US and twelve European economies....

Investor protection regimes have been shown to partly explain why the same type of corporate event may attract different investor reactions across countries. We compare the value effects of large bank merger announcements in Europe and the US and find an inverse relationship between the level of...

Bank regulators across the world have recently lifted restrictions on where banks can operate and what type of activities they can perform. Following the deregulation of the sector, bank mergers and acquisitions have grown substantially. The purpose of this paper is to outline bank deregulation...

While there is some evidence on the impact of international M&As on bank risk profiles, there is a paucity of research on the impact of domestic M&As on bank risk. This paper exploits a rich database of Spanish banks during 1986-2010 to study the changes in bank risk profiles immediately before...

Insurance securitization has long been hailed as an important tool to increase the underwriting capacity for companies exposed to catastrophe-related risks. However, global volumes of insurance securitization have remained surprisingly low to date which raises questions over its benefits. In...

Catastrophe (Cat) bonds are insurance securitization vehicles which are supposed to transfer catastrophe-related underwriting risk from issuers to capital markets. This paper addresses key, unanswered questions concerning Cat bonds and offers the following results. First, our findings show firms...