Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are, however, two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the disciplinary effect of transparency regulation. Second, achieving transparency is costly for banks, as it dilutes their charter values, and hence also reduces their private costs of risk-taking. We consider both the direct costs of complying with disclosure requirements and the indirect transparency costs stemming from imperfect property rights governing information and particularly infer the conditions under which transparency regulation cannot reduce financial fragility.

We establish that the effect of intensified deposit market competition, measured by reduced switching costs, on the probability of bank failures depends critically on whether we focus on competition with established customer relationships or competition for the formation of such relationships. With inherited customer relationships, intensified competition due to lower switching costs destabilizes the banking market, whereas it stabilizes the market if we focus on competition for the formation of customer relationships. We characterize the factors important for evaluating the effects of intensified competition on stability in a market with unattached as well as locked-in depositors.

We estimate convergence in the European retail payments market during the period 1995–2011 for the most popular retail payment instruments: cash, debit card, credit card, direct debit, credit transfer, cheque and e-money. To estimate convergence, we employ the concepts of beta and sigma convergence. There is some evidence of convergence for all payment instruments, except for cheques and e-money. The results suggest that the cross-country dispersion of the use of payment instruments has declined over time in Europe, and the pace of convergence has picked up since the introduction of the single currency. We also find evidence for beta convergence for card payments, direct debits and credit transfers. The results indicate that convergence in European retail payments has progressed despite the financial crisis.

We propose a rationale for why firms often return to the equity market shortly after their initial public offering (IPO). We argue that hard to value firms conduct smaller IPOs, and that they return to the equity market conditional on a positive valuation signal. This is driven by two-way learning, as market information complements both corporate disclosure and internal information available to management. In contrast to prior studies, we find that information asymmetry is not a necessary condition for staged financing. Our arguments receive support in a sample of 3625 U.S. IPOs between 1980 and 2018.