Using an international sample of large banks between 2000 and 2010, we evaluate the risk sensitivity of minimum capital requirements. Our results show that risk-weighted assets (the regulatory measure of portfolio risk, which determines minimum capital requirements) are ill-calibrated to a market measure of bank portfolio risk. We show that this low-risk sensitivity of capital requirements permits banks to build up capital buffers by underreporting their portfolio risk and undermines banks’ ability to withstand adverse shocks. While the risk sensitivity of capital requirements is higher for banks that have adopted Basel II, it remains low across banks and countries.

We analyze how the structure of executive compensation affects the risk choices made by bank CEOs. For a sample of acquiring U.S. banks, we employ the Merton distance to default model to show that CEOs with higher pay-risk sensitivity engage in risk-inducing mergers. Our findings are driven by two types of acquisitions: acquisitions completed during the last decade (after bank deregulation had expanded banks' risk-taking opportunities) and acquisitions completed by the largest banks in our sample (where shareholders benefit from ‘too big to fail’ support by regulators and gain most from shifting risk to other stakeholders). Our results control for CEO pay–performance sensitivity and offer evidence consistent with a causal link between financial stability and the risk-taking incentives embedded in the executive compensation contracts at banks.

Debt overhang and moral hazard predict that poorly capitalized banks have a lower likelihood to issue equity, while the presence of regulatory and market pressures posits an opposite theoretical prediction. By using an international sample of bank seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), we show that the likelihood of issuing SEOs is higher in poorly capitalized banks and that such banks prefer SEOs to alternative capitalization strategies. A series of tests exploring the variation of capital regulation and market discipline show that market mechanisms rather than capital regulation are the primary driver of the decision to issue by poorly capitalized banks.

We analyze the implications of European bank consolidation on the default risk of acquiring banks. For a sample of 134 bidding banks, we employ the Merton distance to default model to show that, on average, bank mergers are risk neutral. However, for relatively safe banks, mergers generate a significant increase in default risk. This result is particularly pronounced for cross-border and activity-diversifying deals as well as for deals completed under weak bank regulatory regimes. Also, large deals, which pose organizational and procedural hurdles, experience a merger-related increase in default risk. Our results cast doubt on the ability of bank merger activity to exert a risk-reducing and stabilizing effect on the European banking industry.

We find that chief executive officers and chief financial officers exert significant individual effects on bank risk. Manager transitions, including transitions generated by plausibly exogenous manager departures, lead to abnormally large changes in bank risk. We demonstrate that the effects of managers on bank risk are sizable and manager-specific. The effects are also partly anticipated by the board because they are reflected in managers’ pay. However, wide-ranging personal attributes, including biographical, experience, and compensation data, only explain a small share of managers’ impact on bank risk. This implies that attempts to rein in bank risk-taking by targeting manager characteristics will be challenging for investors and regulators.

We examine whether increasing financial expertise among independent directors facilitates bank capital decisions that promote financial stability. We find US banks with more financial expert independent directors opt for higher target capital ratios and adjust faster their capital structure when they are below the target. We provide evidence suggesting that our results are driven by the skill-set of these directors that lead to a better understanding of bank risks and access to external recapitalization choices. Our findings are further amplified by an increase in the exposure to losses of financial expert directors and by exogenous increases in regulatory scrutiny.

The view that the independent directors of large banks should contribute to safeguarding the interests of bank creditors and taxpayers, by exercising a stringent risk oversight of bank executives, has gained ground in the aftermath of the 2007–2009 crisis. Using a cross-country sample of large banks for the period 2004–2014, we show that post 2009 an increase in board independence leads to more prudent bank risk-taking compared to the rest of the sample period. This effect materializes via independent boards favoring increases in bank capitalization and decreases in bank portfolio risk after the global crisis. Additional analyses demonstrate, however, that these results do not hold for all large banks in our sample but are confined to the group of banks benefiting from a government bailout during the crisis. In most large international banks board independence does not contribute to safeguarding the interests of bank creditors and taxpayers by constraining bank risk-taking.

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 expose relatively large banks to systematic tail risks, sovereign risks, or banking crises. Instead, we detect a persistent component in the tail risk of relatively large banks that is bank-specific and connected to government guarantees. Furthermore, as banks grow in relative size, tail risks are shifted to debtholders without wealth gains for shareholders.

We examine the cleansing effect of financial crises via their contribution to the exit of inefficient US commercial banks from 1984 to 2013. We find a larger increase in the exit likelihood of less efficient banks as compared to more efficient banks in the years of the Savings and Loans Crisis but not during the Global Financial Crisis. We highlight how the magnitude of the shock of the Global Financial Crisis and the subsequent, broad government interventions might explain these different results. Furthermore, we highlight that both crisis periods have a disproportionate effect on young banks regardless of their efficiency levels and that they do not generate any positive spillover effects on surviving banks in the three years post-crises in spite of some reallocation benefits in favor of new entry banks. Our findings highlight that forms of prudential regulation designed to strengthen bank resilience in good times might contribute to mitigating the effects of crisis on the longer-term productivity of the banking industry.