Board Characteristics and Corporate Governance: A Historical Review of the Banking Industry

This chapter critically discusses how bank governance has evolved in academic research. This chapter differs from other literature reviews of the bank’s corporate governance in two main points. First, we only survey the board governance to highlight a specific aspect of the bank’s corporate governance. Second, this is a historical review that places the literature by the year of publication in a historical context. As presented, the topics that emerged in the M&A and banking consolidation in the 1990s expanded to financial stability in the post-financial crisis of 2008 and recently concerned economic sustainability issues. In addition, contributions to the historical review go beyond the history of corporate governance and motivate us to complete this chapter. We show how the 2008 financial crisis impacted the evolution of the literature on the bank’s board governance and identify the likely directions for future research.