Bank Governance Structures and Risk Taking

The book sheds light on two closely related and highly relevant governance themes: the composition of supervisory boards and financial expertise as well as ownership structure. The author focuses on the financial expertise of supervisory boards and its impact on performance and risk. He analyses how supervisory boards are composed and how much financial expertise their members have, assesses the impact of financial expertise on a banks’ risk-return profiles and investigates if financial expertise in internal bank governance contributes to more stability and less risk taking in banking. Finally, he examines the effects of the ownership structure on credit risk. He finds that banks with a more concentrated ownership structure tend to behave riskier, which is indicated by larger CDS spreads.