This paper provides quantitative evidence on interbank transmission of financial distress in the Panic of 1907 and ensuing recession. Originating in New York City, the panic led to payment suspensions and emergency currency issuance in many cities. Data on the universe of interbank connections...

A nationwide banking panic forced President Franklin Roosevelt to declare a nationwide banking holiday immediately after his inauguration in March 1933. The government reopened sound banks sequentially, with some resuming operations sooner and others later. Within three weeks, 11,000 of the...

The lack of universal deposit insurance coverage can create liquidity risk during financial crises. This aspect of deposit insurance is hard to test in modern data because of the broad coverage of most systems. We, therefore, study the role that the U.S. Postal Savings System played in...

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypothesis of firm cost-minimization. Yet...

Rather than charging direct fees, banks often charge implicitly for their services via interest spreads. As a result, much of bank output has to be estimated indirectly. In contrast to current statistical practice, dynamic optimizing models of banks argue that compensation for bearing systematic...