Whilst the ongoing banking regulatory reforms towards a comprehensive Basel III framework emphasise bank transparency, disclosure and a competitive banking market environment, very little is known about the empirical relationship between bank opacity and banking competition. We investigate the...

We depart from existing literature by invoking analysts' forecasts to measure banking system opacity and then investigate the impact of such opacity on bank risk-taking, using a large panel of US bank holding companies, 1995-2013. We uncover three new results. Firstly, we find that opacity...