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Corporate Governance in Banking: a Conceptual Framework

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Corporate Governance in Banking: A Conceptual Framework

Penny Ciancanelli E-mail: p.ciancanelli@strath.ac.uk And Jose Antonio Reyes Gonzalez E-mail: areyes@eh.quik.co.uk

Department of Accounting and Finance Strathclyde University Glasgow, G4 0LN Tel: (44) (0) 141 548-3896 Fax: (44) (0) 141 548-3547

This paper can be downloaded from the Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=253714

Paper submitted for presentation at the European Financial Management Association Conference, Athens, June, 2000 The authors would appreciate that the copyright of this conference paper be respected and that no part of it is cited without the permission of the authors. The paper was …show more content…

It is outside the scope of this paper to consider the effect of changes in the financial services industry on the varied ways in which regulators have sought to define a bank.
2 The chief features of systemic risk are well known: Runs (unexpected withdrawal of deposits),

unexpected and rapid reversals by securities holders, excessive volatility in the foreign currency market and generalised symptoms of panic amongst financial asset holders. (Sundarajan and Balino,1991) The desire to prevent such episodes is the main rationale for national regulation and the fear of contagion through global systems of intermediation is the main rationale for international efforts at regulation.

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conceptual framework. We do this by analysing the underlying assumptions of the standard theoretical framework adopted in corporate governance studies and demonstrate two complementary arguments. Firstly, we show that the assumptions of Agency Theory make it unsuitable for analysing governance in commercial banks because regulations intended to prevent systemic risk (e.g. secure the integrity of the banking system) limit the disciplinary power of market forces. Secondly, we demonstrate that the agency problem in commercial banks is structurally different from that found in other publicly listed firms. Regulation, a transcendental feature of banking, alters the parameters of the agency relationship by introducing a third

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