We empirically examine whether banks' dividend decisions are influenced by their degree of opacity and ownership structure. We find that banks with concentrated ownership structure pay lower dividends when they have high degrees of opacity, in line with the hypothesis that majority shareholders...

We re-examine the probabilistic foundation of the link between Z-score measures and banks' probability of insolvency, offering an improved measure of that probability without imposing further distributional assumptions. While the traditional measure of the probability of insolvency thus provides...