Opacity fosters price contagion that exacerbates the speculative cycles of bubbles and crashes that create financial instability. We find that banks with larger investments in opaque assets benefitted more from intra-industry revaluations associated with announcements of mergers in the period...

Analyzing syndicated loan and public debt originations by publicly traded U.S. firms between 2004 and 2011, we document a sharp migration from bank borrowing to either no borrowing or public debt issuance in the crisis years. We find evidence for a bank-lending channel; the migration from bank...