Treasury Guest Lecture: The Treasury is pleased to sponsor the following Guest Lecture Guest Lecturer Prof Ross Levine Competition and Bank Opacity Abstract: Did regulatory reforms that lowered barriers to competition among U.S. Date: banks increase or decrease the degree to which banks manipulate the information that they disclose to the public and regulators? We find that Thursday 11th relaxing regulatory impediments to competition reduced discretionary loan December 2014 loss provisioning and the frequency with which banks restate financial Venue: statements. The results suggest that competition reduces bank opacity, enhancing the ability of markets and regulators to monitor banks. The Treasury Level 5 About Prof Ross Levine: 1 The Terrace Ross Levine is the Willis H. Booth Chair in Wellington Banking and Finance at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Time: Berkeley. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute, Research Associate at the 3:30 – 5:00 pm National Bureau of Economic Research, a RSVP: member of the Council on Foreign Relations, academic.linkages@treasury. a member of the European Systemic Risk govt.nz Board’s Advisory Scientific Committee, and on the Steering Committee of the Hoover by Tuesday 9 December Institution’s Working Group on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity. For more information contact: Ross Levine completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University in Kelly Shen 1982 and received his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1987. He worked at Administrator: the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System until 1990, when he Academic Linkages moved to the World Bank. At the Bank, he managed and conducted research Programme and operational programs. Before moving to Berkeley, he worked at Brown E. University, where he was the James and Merryl Tisch Professor of Economics [email protected] and founding Director of the William R. Rhodes Center for International T. 04 917 6295 Economics and Finance. Professor Levine’s work focuses on the linkages between financial sector policies, the operation of financial systems, and the functioning of the economy..