We argue that the risk of banks is hard for outsiders to judge because the risk of their mostly financial assets is either hard to measure (opaque) or easy to change. We report evidence that bond rating agencies seem to disagree more over banks than over other types of firms. Among banks, bond...

Beginning in 1998, U.S. commercial banks with significant trading activities must hold capital against their defined market risk exposure. Under the current regulatory guidelines, this capital charge is a function of banks' own value-at-risk (VaR) estimates. Two hypothesis-testing methods for...