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 included the advent of loan sales, increased loan syndications, the … calibrate a model of bank innovation to determine the quantitative contribution of bank innovation to economic growth …

representatives on corporate boards. If a banking relationship is a substitute for the stock market, then interaction with a bank … monopolistic control over access to external capital markets, then bank interests may conflict with those of other equityholders … structure of the firms' equity. We test for conflicts-of-interest in bank behavior and ask whether the relationship between …

Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires … that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value …-insensitive assets. For the economy as a whole, firms endogenously separate into bank finance and capital market/stock market finance …

An examination of U.S. banking history shows that economically efficient private bank money requires that information …-revealing securities markets for bank liabilities be closed. That is, banks are optimally opaque, which is why they are regulated and … examined. I show this by examining the transition from private bank notes, the predominant form of money before the U.S. Civil …