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Report
Corporate governance and banks: what have we learned from the financial crisis?
Recent academic work and policy analysis give insight into the governance problems exposed by the financial crisis and suggest possible solutions. We begin this paper by explaining why governance of banks differs from governance of nonfinancial firms. We then look at four areas of governance: executive compensation, boards, risk management, and market discipline. We discuss promising solutions and areas where further research is needed.
Working Paper
Executive compensation at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Corporate governance-and executive-compensation arrangements in particular-should be an important component of the agenda to reform the housing GSEs. The GSEs' safety-and-soundness regulator-who is essentially the debtholders' and taxpayers' representative-must be admitted to the GSEs' boardroom in a way that is atypical of an ordinary publicly held company. This intrusion into the board's oversight of executive-compensation plans is justified given the GSEs' public purposes and their large potential cost to taxpayers. Prudent public policy requires greater supervisory control over executive ...
Newsletter
Executive compensation and market risks
Some U.S. taxpayers were angry and felt betrayed when financial company executives received large bonuses in the midst of the 2008-09 financial crisis. These executives headed some of the same firms whose risky practices contributed to the crisis?and then later received billions of dollars in government bailouts. Who makes the changes in executive compensation policies and regulations to avoid such risks in the future? Read the February 2010 Newsletter for answers and interesting insights.
Speech
Still more lessons from the crisis
Remarks at the Foreign Policy Association Corporate Dinner, New York City
Working Paper
A unified analysis of executive pay: the case of the banking industry
This study examines executive compensation determinants in the U.S. banking industry. Multiple theories of executive pay are discussed and tested using a relatively homogenous sample. We perform an in-depth look at the corporate governance and ownership structure of the companies selected. We explore the simultaneous relationship between compensation, firm performance, and board strength, exploiting variables unique to the banking industry. Our primary finding is that after controlling for both regulatory oversight and external market discipline, a strong board is associated with higher firm ...
Discussion Paper
Incentive compensation in the banking industry: insights from economic theory
How can banks and similar institutions design optimal compensation systems? Would such systems conflict with the goals of society? This paper considers a theoretical framework of how banks structure job contracts with their employees to explore three points: the structure of a socially optimal compensation system; the structure of a compensation system that is privately optimal, given the reality of government-guaranteed bank debt; and policy interventions that can lead from the second structure to the first. Analysis reveals a potential policy option: providing proper incentives to banks by ...
Report
Executive compensation and risk taking
This paper studies the connection between risk taking and executive compensation in financial institutions. A theoretical model of shareholders, debtholders, depositors, and an executive suggests that 1) in principle, excessive risk taking (in the form of risk shifting) may be addressed by basing compensation on both stock price and the price of debt (proxied by the credit default swap spread), but 2) shareholders may be unable to commit to designing compensation contracts in this way and indeed may not want to because of distortions introduced by either deposit insurance or naive ...
Journal Article
Fear and loathing in executive pay
A look at how U.S. corporations choose to motivate their top officers and a presentation of evidence showing that linking executive compensation too closely to firm performance may be a mistake.
Report
What can we learn from privately held firms about executive compensation?
We study the Green and Lin (2003) model of financial intermediation with two new features: traders may face a cost of contacting the intermediary, and consumption needs may be correlated across traders. We show that each feature is capable of generating an equilibrium in which some (but not all) traders ?run? on the intermediary by withdrawing their funds at the first opportunity regardless of their true consumption needs. Our results also provide some insight into elements of the economic environment that are necessary for a run equilibrium to exist in general models of financial ...