One, of several, regulatory responses to the financial crisis has been to consider the extent to which bank failure can be explained by flaws in banks’ corporate governance arrangements.

In many jurisdictions this diagnosis has generated calls upon shareholders to act as effective owners and hold boards of banks to account, as well as calls to empower shareholders to enable them to do so. But what do we know about the relationship between shareholder power and bank failure? To date scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between board independence and bank failure, but limited attention has been given to the relationship between bank failure and the core corporate governance rules that determine the ease with which shareholders can remove and replace management. In our paper, Shareholder Empowerment and Bank Bailouts, we examine the relationship between shareholder power — and, thus, managerial accountability — and the probability of bank bailouts.

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