From 1883 to 1892, the circulation of national bank notes in the United States fell nearly 50 percent. Previous studies have attributed this to supply-side factors that led to a decline in the profitability of note issue during this period. This paper provides an alternative explanation. The...

Systemic banking and financial crises invariably result in the transfer of a large volume of distressed financial assets into the hands of the government, which must later dispose of them. The fiscal and economic costs of the crisis and the speed of recovery depend on how effectively the...

We empirically examine whether a major government intervention in the small-firm credit market yields significantly better results in markets that are less financially developed. The government intervention that we investigate is SBA-guaranteed lending. The literature on financing small and...

We empirically test whether SBA-guaranteed lending has a greater impact on economic performance in markets with a high percentage of potential minority small businesses. This hypothesis is predicated on priors related to three overlapping assumptions. These three assumptions are: (1) The classic...

Recent advances in asset pricing-the reduced-form approach to pricing risky debt and derivatives-are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. The authors find that credit spreads on both fixed- and floating-rate subordinated debt provide...