Essays on malpractice in finance

This dissertation consists of three chapters that focus on misconduct in the financial sector. The first two chapters attempt to tackle the question of what factors contribute to misconduct in banks, focusing on the role of agency conflicts and how these change with bank risk. The final part of this dissertation studies how misconduct by public officials - corruption - is related to bank health, resolution methods and costs. The common theme in this dissertation is malpractice, and both theoretical models and empirical methods are employed to investigate how it arises in financial firms or affects their functioning.