Do Social Networks Encourage Risk-Taking? Evidence from Bank CEOs

Yiwei Fang, Iftekhar Hasan, LiuLing Liu and Haizhi Wang

No 1641, BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers from BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy

Abstract: This paper studies how CEO social networks affect bank risk-taking. Using a sample of 481 publicly traded U.S. banks, we find that bank risk increases with CEOs’ social networks. Our results are robust with a bank fixed-effects model and a difference-in-difference approach, as well as with various alternative bank risk measures. Alternative explanations such as corporate governance, managerial ownership, compensation, or CEO ability do not drive the findings. We evaluate potential channels through which social networks affect bank risk and find that CEO social networks increase bank risk more when banks face opaque information environments, when CEO job market conditions worsen, and when there are higher odds of group-think mentality in the networks. We further find that social networks present banks with an inefficient trade-off between risk and return, showing a “dark side” of social networks.

Keywords: Risk-taking; social networks; bank CEOs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G31 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cfn and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibocconi.it/baffic/baf/papers/cbafwp1641.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp1641

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers from BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy Via Röntgen, 1 - 20136 Milano - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michela Pozzi ().