Based on archival and survey data we show that the maturity of U.S. business loans has been continuously increasing since the mid-1930s when banks invented the term loan. Concurrently, bank innovation first involved the invention of credit analysis and covenant design. Later, bank innovation...

"Risk management" in securities markets refers to the oversight of portfolio managers and professional traders when they trade on behalf of investors in security markets. Monitoring of their trading performance, profit and loss, and risk-taking behavior, is measured by principals using security...

I test the Dang, Gorton, and Holmström (2018) (DGH) theory that the optimal design of private money is debt backed by debt. I do this in the context of English inland bills of exchange (where all parties to the bill were in England), which were used as a medium of exchange during the Industrial...

Financial crises are bank runs. At root the problem is short-term debt (private money), which while an essential feature of market economies, is inherently vulnerable to runs in all its forms (not just demand deposits). Bank regulation aims at preventing bank runs. History shows two approaches...

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using...

Social progress through improved treatment of minority groups (the embrace of anti-racist and anti-sexist norms, for example) may or may not spread to corporate cultures through competition. Sometimes the market fails to adapt on its own and government must pass legislation to secure changes in...

Short-term debt that can serve as a medium of exchange is designed to be information insensitive. No one should be tempted to acquire private information to gain an informational advantage in trading that could destabilize the value of the debt. Short-term debt minimizes the incentive to acquire...

Corporate culture is an omnibus term that includes many elements like norms, values, knowledge, and customs that are relevant to a firm. Economists have made great progress recently in devising methods of measuring different aspects of corporate culture. These empirical measures of culture have...

It is difficult for private agents to produce money that circulates at par with no questions asked. We study two cases of privately-produced money: pre-Civil War U.S. private banknotes and modern stablecoins. Private monies are introduced when there are no better alternatives, but they initially...

Markets and firms offer contrasting methods to arrange production. In markets, contracts govern the purchase of parts and services that compose production. In firms, the shared values, customs, and norms coming from a corporate culture govern employees' joint development of those parts and...