Corporate board and default risk of financial firms

This paper analyses the impact of corporate board structure on default risk of European banking firms. We focus on four core aspects of boards that have been addressed in Directive 2013/36/EU to strengthen the corporate governance of banks: the size of boards, their independence, the participation of female directors and CEO duality. We employ panel data analysis to study the 109 European listed banks between 2002 and 2019. Default risk is estimated by Merton's (1974) distance to default. We take into account the presence of unobservable heterogeneity, simultaneity and dynamic endogeneity and estimate the model using the dynamic difference and dynamic system GMM methodologies. The results show that the size of the board influences banks' default risk. Furthermore, bank size, firm profitability and GDP also exert a considerable influence.