Kenneth Spong

Who's Minding the Store? Motivating and Monitoring Hired Managers at Small, Closely Held Commercial Banks

Small closely held corporations cannot rely on market forces or outside monitors to discipline hired managers. For such firms, managerial shareholdings may be a disproportionately important tool for controlling principal-agent problems. We study a random sample of 266 small, closely held U.S. commercial banks with a broad range of ownership and management arrangements. Our results suggest that hiring an outside manager can improve a banks profitability, but these gains depend on aligning the hired managers with owners via managerial shareholdings. We find that over-utilizing this control mechanism results in entrenchment, while under-utilization is costly in terms of foregone profits.

Corporate Governance and Bank Performance

Recent corporate scandals, together with the effects of globalization, have led to an increasing interest in corporate governance issues. Little attention has been paid, however, to international laws and recommendations dealing with corporate governance in banking from a global perspective. This impressive international set of expert contributors – academics, practitioners and regulators – remedies the lack of attention by examining the various issues and concerns of this important topic.

Who's Minding the Store? Motivating and Monitoring Hired Managers at Small, Closely Held Firms: The Case of Commercial Banks

We test whether the gains from hiring an outside manager exceed the principal-agent costs of owner-manager separation at 266 small, closely held U.S. commercial banks. Our results suggest that hiring an outside manager can improve a banks profit efficiency, but that these gains depend on aligning the hired managers with owners via managerial shareholdings. We find that over-utilizing this control mechanism results in entrenchment, while under-utilization is costly in terms of foregone profits. This study provides a relatively unfettered test of mitigating principal-agent costs, because these small banks cannot rely on market forces or blocks of outside investors to monitor managers.

Tax Incentives for Homeownership and the Provision of Local Public Services

There is a substantial literature that assesses the distributional impact of the mortgage interest and state and local property tax deductions and the disparate incentives for buying a home across income groups, but virtually no work exists that evaluates the secondary effect on the provision of local public services. In this paper we evaluate the impact that disparate homeowner tax subsidies have on the provision of local public services, specifically, schools. Performing a path analysis, we find that a 100 percent increase in the average homeowner tax subsidy yields a ten percent increase in local public school spending per student.

Bank Ownership and Risk Taking: Improving Corporate Governance in Banking after the Crisis

Some have suggested that weaknesses in bank corporate governance played a prominent role in the recent financial crisis, most notably through poorly designed executive compensation packages and from various aspects of the public safety net that may have blunted the normal forces of market discipline. On the other hand, recent research has not led to a consensus on whether shortcomings in corporate governance contributed significantly to the crisis, and this research further indicates the difficulty of condensing corporate governance into a few simple and testable relationships. In this chapter, we examine key aspects of the corporate governance framework for financial institutions and discuss what they tell us about possible reforms and improvements in the wake of the financial crisis. Through the use of a unique data source and a sample of small banks, we are able to simultaneously account for the incentives and constraints that influence the major participants in a bank’s management and oversight. We find that the stock ownership by bank managers, their wealth diversification, the structure of managerial compensation, monitoring by directors and major stockholders, and the composition and characteristics of bank boards all have an important influence on the amount of risk taking in our sample banks. Used properly, tools such as ownership and compensation, monitoring, and other policies can help ensure that risk is managed within desired or acceptable parameters. In the end, we find that governance works best when managers, directors, and stockholders all have a significant personal stake in their decisions.

Promoting Wealth Building Through Homeownership

Current tax policies, while commonly thought to promote homeownership, have generally left low-income homeowners behind other homeowners. Using a number of simplifying assumptions, our estimates of lifetime homeowner tax subsidies suggest that the average homeowner in the lowest-income quintile may receive cumulative tax subsidies that are roughly one-thirteenth the size of those received by someone in the highest-income quintile. From an asset- and wealth-building perspective, the tax system thus places low-income households at a very large disadvantage – both in their quest to become homeowners and in what happens after they achieve homeownership status.

Tax Incentives for Homeownership and the Provision of Local Public Services in Low-and-Moderate Income Areas

There is a substantial literature that assesses the distributional impact of the mortgage interest and state and local property tax deductions and the disparate incentives for buying a home across income groups, but virtually no work exists that evaluates the secondary effect on the provision of public services in high-income vis-a-vis low-income areas. In this paper we reveal significant geographic variation in homeowner tax subsidies in the State of Missouri. We then evaluate the impact that disparate subsidies have on the provision of local public services, specifically, schools. Estimating a structural model and performing a path analysis, we find that a 100 percent increase in the average homeowner tax subsidy yields a ten percent increase in local spending per student.

Potential competition and the factors influencing banking concentration

Multiple regression analysis is used to study the factors influencing market concentration in urban banking markets. The results indicate that independentdenovo entry and shifts in population from the central city to the suburbs can be important deconcentrating factors in urban banking markets. In terms of the potential competition doctrine, the results suggest that attractive banking markets are likely to attract enough actual and potential entrants to mitigate any problems associated with a leading bank acquisition by a potential entrant. On the other hand, potential competition is more likely to be an issue in less attractive banking markets where the probability of entry is low.