This study empirically identifies factors that influenced geographic differentials in the bank closing rate in the United States over the period 1982 through 1990. Given the presence of censored data, the model adopts the tobit estimation procedure. The bank closing rate in a state is found to...

A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes. This literature has had a serious gap: no direct measure of colonial European settlement. In this paper, we (1) construct a new database on...