A theory of bank regulation and management compensation

We show that concentrating bank regulation on bank capital ratiosmay be ineffective in controlling risk taking. We propose, instead,a more direct mechanism of influencing bank risk-taking incentives,in which the FDIC insurance premium scheme incorporates incentivefeatures of top-management compensation. With this scheme, weshow that bank owners choose an optimal management compensationstructure that induces first-best value-maximizing investmentchoices by a bank's management. We explicitly characterize theparameters of the optimal management compensation structureand the fairly priced FDIC insurance premium in the presenceof a single or multiple sources of agency problems.