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 …

research on financial intermediation. We focus on the role of bank-like intermediaries in the savings-investment process. We … also investigate the literature on bank instability and the role of the government …

of new banks issuing bank notes for the first time during the America Free Banking Era (1838-1860). The presence of a …

eroded the profitability of banks' traditional activities. Bank failures, insignificant from 1934, the date the Glass … centers on fixed-rate deposit insurance: the insurance gives bank shareholders an incentive to take on risk when the value of … bank charters falls. We propose and test an alternative explanation based on corporate control considerations. We show that …

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 …