Because California was a pioneer in the development of intrastate branching, we use its experience during the 1920s and 1930s to assess the effects of the expansion of large-scale, branch-banking networks on competition and the stability of banking systems. Using a new database of individual...

Drawing on the variation in financial distress across U.S. states during the Great Depression, this article suggests how bank supervision and regulation affected banking stability during the Great Depression. In response to well-organized interest groups and public concern over the bank failures...

Even after controlling for local economic conditions, differences in state bank supervision and regulation contribute toward explaining the large variation in state bank suspension rates across U.S. counties during the Great Depression. More stringent capital requirements lowered suspension...

We use a novel data set spanning 1820-1910 to examine the origins of bank supervision and assess factors leading to the creation of formal bank supervision across U.S. states. We show that it took more than a century for the widespread adoption of independent supervisory institutions tasked with...

The creation of the euro and the European Central Bank is a remarkable and unprecedented event in economic and political history: creating a supranational central bank and leaving eleven countries without national currencies of their own. The experience of the first year confirms that one size...

This paper, prepared for the annual meetings of the American Economic Association, discusses how the increases in the U.S. budget deficits since 1980 have affected the economies of Western Europe. The analysis emphasizes that U.S. deficits have not only affected these economies directly but have...

This paper illustrates the importance of the fiscal framework for monetary analysis by discussing three separate issues. I begin by examining how the fiscal framework changes the macroeconomic equilibrium associated with different steady state rates of money growth. This includes a summary of...

This paper is an introductory chapter to a book that brings together 22 of my papers written between 1965 and 1981. The chapter provides a summary of each paper and a more general discussion of the role of taxation in influencing the process of capita1 accumulation. The four sections of the book...

This paper begins by discussing the inherent conflict between the simultaneous existence of a single currency for the countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the independent fiscal policies of those countries. The Stability and Growth Pact was an attempt to reconcile that...

This paper discusses a possible solution to the double problem that faces European governments in dealing with the future of Social Security pensions. Like other governments around the world, they must deal with the rising cost of pensions that will result from the increasing life expectancy of...