Authors: Maria Psillaki, Christina Mavrakana

Title: Does board structure matter for bank performance?

Abstract

The recent financial crisis of 2008 in combination with the economic scandals of companies brought into question the effectiveness of the governance mechanisms and practices. Despite the large literature that exists in this field, only few papers have focused on corporate governance of financial institutions. The aim of our paper is to examine whether board structure according to different determinants and socioeconomic characteristics such as board size, independence and gender diversity affect bank performance and if there are changes before and during the period of global financial crisis. For instance examining the effect of executive board composition on risk taking in the context of a two-tier or one-tier system offers the benefit of a clear distinction between inside directors and outside directors, important to explain changes in banks’ performance.