Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the...

Consider a competitive bank whose illiquid asset portfolio is funded by short-term debt that has to be refinanced before the asset matures. We show that in this setting maximal transparency is not socially optimal, and that the existence of social externalities of bank failures further lowers...

We study the optimal precision of public information disclosures about banks assets quality. In our model the precision of information affects banks' cost of raising funding and asset profile riskiness. In an imperfectly competitive banking sector, banks'stability and social surplus are...