In the face of the Lucas Critique, economic history can be used to evaluate policy. We use the experience of the U.S. National Banking Era to evaluate the most important bank regulation to emerge from the financial crisis, the Bank for International Settlement's liquidity coverage ratio (LCR)...

We study a modification of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model in which the bank may hold a liquid asset, some depositors see sunspots that could lead them to run, and all depositors have incomplete information about the bank's ability to survive a run. The incomplete information means that the...

Higher capital ratios are unlikely to prevent a financial crisis. This is empirically true both for the entire history of advanced economies between 1870 and 2013 and for the post-WW2 period, and holds both within and between countries. We reach this startling conclusion using newly collected...

The deposit business differs at large versus small banks. We provide a parsimonious model and extensive empirical evidence supporting the idea that much of the variation in deposit-pricing behavior between large and small banks reflects differences in "preferences and technologies." Large banks...

We develop a framework to estimate bank franchise value. Contrary to existing models, sticky deposits and low deposit rate betas do not imply negative duration. While operating costs could generate negative duration, they are offset by fixed interest rate spreads from lending activity....

We assess the efficacy of systemic risk measures that rely on U.S. financial firms' stock return co-movements with market- or sector-wide returns under stress from 1927 to 2023. We ascertain stress episodes based on widening of corporate bond spreads and narrative dating. Systemic risk measures...

We report evidence from the equity market that unused loan commitments expose banks to systematic liquidity risk, especially during crises such as the one observed in the fall of 1998. We also find, however, that banks with higher levels of transactions deposits had lower risk during the 1998...

We show in this paper that bank failures can be contagious. Unlike earlier work where contagion stems from depositor panics or ex ante contractual links between banks, we argue bank failures can shrink the common pool of liquidity, creating or exacerbating aggregate liquidity shortages. This...