Theoretical studies suggest that increased transparency reduces a firm's cost of capital (Diamond & Verrecchia, 1991). Thus, more transparency should improve financial performance. We examine the relation between firm transparency and bank holding company (BHC) profit efficiency using the number...

We build a bank-specific, fixed-effects regression model to develop proxies for a bank's monitoring effort. Our results show that banks that devote more resources to monitoring (based on these proxies) are more profit efficient and the effect is large. A very important theoretical literature in...