The first essay studies the impact of compensation on the types of risk taken by bank CEOs according to the time horizon when losses are realized. Bonus is recognized to encourage executives to boost short-term profits while equity compensation motivates long term growth. I use Guidance on Sound Incentive Compensation Policies (“the Guidance”), part of the Dodd-Frank Act, as an exogenous shock to the compensation structure of executives in banks with over $1 billion total assets. The Guidance requires banks to make deferred payment and risk adjusted awards. Using banks with less than $1billion in assets as control, I find that the treated banks pay executives with higher percentage in the stocks and engage in activities with less short-term risk and less down-side long-term risk. This paper empirically documents the effectiveness of the Guidance on the bank CEOs compensation and show that the compensation structure alters the types of risk that CEOs take.

The second essay documents the cross hedging of interest rate risk within bank holding companies (BHCs): Subsidiaries capable of risk management manage interest rate risk for themselves and for other banks in the same BHC. Bank mergers are used as exogenous shocks to address endogeneity concerns. Cross hedging increases with the complexity of BHCs, uses funds from the external capital market, and reduces exposure to interest rate risk. The paper contributes to the internal capital market literature by documenting risk management redistribution in BHCs.

Many thanks to Congyu’s dissertation committee:
• Committee Chair: Jie Cai–Associate Professor – Drexel University
• Committee Co-Chair: Greg Nini – Assistant Professor – Drexel University
• Committee Member: Michael Gombola — Professor- Drexel University
• Committee Member: Thomas Chiang - Professor – Drexel University
• Committee Member: Michael Pagano - Professor – Villanova University