We investigate whether bank performance during the recent credit crisis is related to chief executive officer (CEO) incentives before the crisis. We find some evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were better aligned with the interests of shareholders performed worse and no evidence that they performed better. Banks with higher option compensation and a larger fraction of compensation in cash bonuses for their CEOs did not perform worse during the crisis. Bank CEOs did not reduce their holdings of shares in anticipation of the crisis or during the crisis. Consequently, they suffered extremely large wealth losses in the wake of the crisis.
Jian Wang, Matthias Finger, Lesya Shchutska, Qian Wang, Matthias Wolf, Varun Sharma, Konstantin Androsov, Jan Steggemann, Leonardo Cristella, Xin Chen, Davide Di Croce, Mingkui Wang, Zhirui Xu, João Miguel das Neves Duarte, Tagir Aushev, Tian Cheng, Yixing Chen, Werner Lustermann, Andromachi Tsirou, Alexis Kalogeropoulos, Andrea Rizzi, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Paolo Ronchese, Thomas Muller, Ho Ling Li, Giuseppe Codispoti, Hua Zhang, Siyuan Wang, Peter Hansen, Daniel Gonzalez, Tao Huang, David Vannerom, Michele Bianco, Kun Shi, Wei Shi, Abhisek Datta, Ji Hyun Kim, Donghyun Kim, Dipanwita Dutta, Zheng Wang, Sanjeev Kumar, Wei Li, Yong Yang, Yi Wang, Ajay Kumar, Ashish Sharma, Georgios Anagnostou, Joao Varela, Csaba Hajdu, Muhammad Ahmad, Ekaterina Kuznetsova, Ioannis Evangelou, Matthias Weber, Muhammad Shoaib, Milos Dordevic, Vineet Kumar, Vladimir Petrov, Francesco Fiori, Quentin Python, Meng Xiao, Hao Liu, Sourav Sen, Viktor Khristenko, Marco Trovato, Gurpreet Singh, Fan Xia, Xiao Wang, Bibhuprasad Mahakud, Jing Li, Rajat Gupta, Lei Feng, Muhammad Waqas, Hui Wang, Seungkyu Ha, Davide Cieri, Maren Tabea Meinhard, Giorgia Rauco, Ali Harb, Benjamin William Allen, Pratyush Das, Miao Hu, Lei Li
Jean-François Molinari, Tobias Brink, Gianluca Costagliola, Julie Richard