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Bank failures are critical events that have far-reaching implications for the financial system and various stakeholders. This study aims to focus on analyzing the phenomenon of small bank failures in the USA.

This study adopts the coarsened exact matching (CEM) technique to enhance the reliability of the analysis. By matching similar observed characteristics, the CEM approach helps to address potential selectivity bias and facilitates a more accurate estimation of the treatment effect. This study uses a data set covering the period from 2000 through 2019 and includes 523 failed bank observations and 43,605 nonfailed bank observations.

The results reveal several key findings. Small banks, especially those with lower yields on earning assets, those with lower charge-offs on loans and leases, those with higher core capital ratios and those with higher Fed Funds rates are found to be more susceptible to failure.

Some results align with initial predictions, whereas others present contrasting outcomes.

This study underscores the significance of understanding the factors contributing to bank failure and emphasizes the importance of studying small bank failures in particular.

This study uses the CEM method. CEM is a comprehensive approach that combines matching, sample trimming and reweighting techniques. When applying CEM, researchers carefully select a set of core variables to achieve balance between the treated and control groups. The CEM process involves discretizing each continuous variable into distinct bins or categories, a process known as “coarsening.” It then requires an exact match among these binned variables between the treated and control units, which constitutes the matching step in CEM.

This study aims to explore the relationship between risk governance characteristics (chief risk officer [CRO], chief financial officer [CFO] and senior directors [SENIOR]) and regulatory adjustments (RAs) in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development public commercial banks.

Using principal component analysis (PCA) and regression models, the research analyzes a representative data set of these banks.

A significant negative correlation between risk governance characteristics and RAs is found. Sensitivity analysis on the regulatory Tier 1 capital ratio and the total capital ratio indicates mixed outcomes, suggesting a complex relationship that warrants further exploration.

The study’s limited sample size calls for further research to confirm findings and explore risk governance’s impact on banks’ capital structures.

Enhanced risk governance could reduce RAs, influencing banking policy.

The study advocates for improved banking regulatory practices, potentially increasing sector stability and public trust.

This study contributes to understanding risk governance’s role in regulatory compliance, offering insights for policymaking in banking.

This paper aims to examine the extent of ethical values information disclosure on the top 100 Malaysian and Indonesian companies’ annual reports using coercive isomorphism under the institutional theory.

Using the content analysis, the presence or exclusion of ethical values information disclosed on 100 Malaysian and Indonesian companies’ annual reports using a newly developed Ethical Values Disclosure Index is carried out.

The results of the analysis found that Indonesian companies on average disclosed 31 items under study compared to 27 items disclosed by the companies in Malaysia. The results suggest that Indonesian companies are more vigilant in the code of ethics, companies policy on ethical issues, monitoring program and accountability, ethical performance, ethical infrastructure and organizational responsibility aspects, whereas their Malaysian counterparts are better in reporting governance and integrity committee or board of directors.

The findings may not be applicable to other countries in the same region, nevertheless, revealed the importance of adequate ethical values disclosure in determining the level of ethical behavior.

Companies in Indonesia are coercively pressed by various influential stakeholder groups to address ethical issues. The less disclosure regarding corporate ethical behavior may indicate that unethical practices continue to be a problem in the Malaysian corporate sector.

This paper adds to the literature by examining the elements of ethical values adapted mainly from the professional bodies that regulate the accounting profession and other organizations using the institutional theory, particularly in two countries.

This study seeks to identify the main determinants of the optimal capital structure by reexamining the interpretation of the conventional set of explanatory variables used as proxies for the costs and benefits of debt in the context of the dynamic tradeoff theory.

The authors isolate the variation in leverage due to different targets from that caused by deviations by aggregating the data across a dimension identifying firms with similar targets – credit rating category.

Contrary to theoretical priors, large and profitable rated firms have lower targets. The authors show that size and profitability proxy for non-financial risk and that, for rated firms, non-financial risk is positively correlated to the optimal leverage. The benefits of a better rating outweigh the costs of foregone tax shields for firms with relatively low non-financial risk. The authors find support for that theory in institutional trading – institutional investors do not punish highly rated firms when credit downgrades occur.

This paper contributes to the capital structure literature by developing a new approach based on data aggregation. This study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to find a positive effect of the firm's non-financial risk on target leverage among rated firms. The authors argue that the benefit of a better credit rating is an increasing function of the rating itself. The authors also contribute to the literature on the impact of credit ratings on the capital structure choices of the firm.

Although risk culture is a key determinant for an effective risk management, identifying the risk culture of a firm can be challenging due to the abstract concept of culture. This paper proposes a novel approach that uses unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify significant features needed to assess and differentiate between different forms of risk culture.

To convert the unstructured text in our sample of banks' 10K reports into structured data, a two-dimensional dictionary for text mining is built to capture risk culture characteristics and the bank's attitude towards the risk culture characteristics. A principal component analysis (PCA) reduction technique is applied to extract the significant features that define risk culture, before using a K-means unsupervised learning to cluster the reports into distinct risk culture groups.

The PCA identifies uncertainty, litigious and constraining sentiments among risk culture features to be significant in defining the risk culture of banks. Cluster analysis on the PCA factors proposes three distinct risk culture clusters: good, fair and poor. Consistent with regulatory expectations, a good or fair risk culture in banks is characterized by high profitability ratios, bank stability, lower default risk and good governance.

The relationship between culture and risk management can be difficult to study given that it is hard to measure culture from traditional data sources that are messy and diverse. This study offers a better understanding of risk culture using an unsupervised machine learning approach.

With sanctions becoming an increasingly important tool in ostracising autocratic regimes from western markets, the need for effective enforcement of sanctions and anti-money laundering (AML) is increasing, and the global AML regime will be the backbone to detecting evasion of sanctions. This regime, however, has been widely criticised as ineffective. This paper aims to discuss issues with the current sanctions/AML regime and propose a reward scheme for whistleblowers to enable asset seizures that is not reliant on its effectiveness.

This paper reviews weaknesses in the global AML regime, provide suggestions on how to design whistleblower reward programmes, based on agency experience and empirical evidence, as well as elaborate on how to use such programmes in the AML context.

This study concludes that for reward programmes to be effective in the context of AML and sanctions enforcement, they need to include witness protection and leniency for money launderers, though not for those convicted of a criminal offence associated with the predicate crime. Moreover, rewards should be mandatory and scale with the amount of money seized or confiscated, and the cap on monetary rewards should be higher than it is under the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Rewards Programme in the USA.

In contrast to how the USA went about implementing rewards in this area under the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Rewards Programme, this study argues that these programmes should be designed differently. This study also provides novel advice to governments on different design dimensions in the AML context and a model with three crucial pillars along with other design dimensions that should be considered.

Cryptocurrency arose, and grew in popularity, following the financial crisis of 2008 built upon a promise of decentralizing money and payments. An examination of the history of money and banking in the United States demonstrates that stable money benefits from strict controls and commitments by a centralized government through chartering restrictions and a broad safety net, rather than decentralization. In addition, financial crises happen when the government allows money creation to occur outside of official channels. The US central bank is then forced into a policy of supporting a range of money-like assets in order to maintain a grip on monetary policy and some semblance of financial stability.

In addition, this chapter argues that cryptocurrency as a form of shadow money shares many of the problematic attributes of both the privately issued bank notes that created instability during the “free banking” era and the “shadow banking” activities that contributed to the 2008 crisis. In this sense, rather than being a novel and disruptive idea, cryptocurrency replicates many of the systemically destabilizing aspects of privately issued money and money-like instruments.

This chapter proposes that, rather than allowing a new, digital “free banking” era to emerge, there are better alternatives. Specifically, it argues that the Federal Reserve (Fed) should use its tools to improve public payment systems, enact robust utility-like regulations for private digital currencies and limit the likelihood of bubbles using prudential measures.