Prior literature suggests that opacity in the banking industry is mainly caused by a lack of informativeness in the assessment of the quality of bank assets. Examining a sample of bank holding companies in the United States, we find that there is a negative relationship between opacity and bank valuation during the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. We further attempt to identify two potential channels through which opacity negatively affects bank valuation during the financial crisis: a cash flow channel and an expected return channel. We show that one channel flows from bank profitability, measured by return on equity and return on assets, confirming a cash flow channel, whereas an expected return channel, proxied by the implied cost of capital, only works for small banks. Overall, this study sheds light on the relationship between in-transparency and bank value discount during a global recession.

先前的文献表明，银行业的不透明主要是由于缺乏对银行资产质量评估的信息量造成的。通过检查美国银行控股公司的样本，我们发现在 2007-2009 年全球金融危机期间，不透明度与银行估值之间存在负相关关系。我们进一步尝试确定金融危机期间不透明度对银行估值产生负面影响的两个潜在渠道：现金流渠道和预期回报渠道。我们表明，一个渠道来自银行盈利能力，以股本回报率和资产回报率衡量，确认现金流渠道，而预期回报渠道，以隐含资本成本为代表，仅适用于小型银行。全面的，