Banks differ from non-financial firms as banks must communicate to both regulators and shareholders. Also, unlike non-financial firms, banks possess opaque and complex balance sheets and are the main providers of credit to the real economy. In this paper, I propose a new index to detect the idiosyncratic uncertainty banks face at the bank-quarter level by applying natural language processing techniques to earnings conference call transcripts. The index reveals which banks at a given quarter signal more uncertainty about their balance sheets. Higher uncertainty is associated with lower lending and higher liquidity the next quarter, suggesting active management of uncertainty. The active management of uncertainty is more pronounced during periods of high aggregate volatility and for banks with more skin in the game. Using loan level data and firm fixed effects, I control for demand-side factors and find that higher bank level uncertainty is associated with lower loan issuances the following quarter.

中文翻译：

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打破世界银行：银行水平不确定性的测量和影响

银行不同于非金融公司，因为银行必须与监管机构和股东沟通。此外，与非金融企业不同，银行拥有不透明和复杂的资产负债表，是实体经济的主要信贷提供者。在本文中，我提出了一个新指标，通过将自然语言处理技术应用于收益电话会议记录，来检测银行在季度级别面临的特殊不确定性。该指数揭示了特定季度哪些银行表明其资产负债表存在更多不确定性。更高的不确定性与下个季度的贷款减少和流动性增加有关，这表明对不确定性的积极管理。在总体波动性高的时期，以及在游戏中有更多皮肤的银行，对不确定性的积极管理更为明显。