Essays on Finance and Banking

A flurry of new regulation was passed in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007. Much remains however unknown about policies designed to prevent a repeat. In this dissertation I investigate two such regulatory approaches in financial and banking markets. In Chapter 2 I present an analysis of a revision of proxy access rules as it was mandated by Congress in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and subsequently implemented by the SEC in August 2010. Proxy access - the right for shareholders to nominate directors to a firm's board - lies at the heart of shareholder control and the monitoring process of management. I use the repeal of a new proxy access regime by the U.S. Court of Appeals as a natural experiment to quantify the costs and benefits associated with proxy access. The findings indicate that proxy access resulted in an increase of shareholder wealth for firms with agency issues, smaller firms, and firms where more investors qualified to make use of it. There are no valuation changes for large firms, firms without any agency issues and firms with special-interest investors. The results indicate that the market valued the empowerment of shareholders positively and calls for renewed regulatory attention to proxy access. Chapter 3 analyzes the effects from portfolio diversification and banking competition on the stability of U.S. banks during the 2008-2011 banking crisis in which more than 10% of U.S. banks ceased to exist. To do so, the analysis makes use of exogenous cross-sectional and time-series variation in states' branching restrictions, the degree of county business cycle integration, and topographic variation due to oceans and international borders that limited the potential to diversify. I find that both banking competition and portfolio diversification significantly reduced the failure probability of banks thereby providing a policy rationale to reduce the financial fragmentation of U.S. banking markets, to promote banking competition and an overall greater degree of diversification