Crowding-out during the British Industrial Revolution has long been one of the leading explanations for slow growth during the Industrial Revolution, but little empirical evidence exists to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided, and that the...

Two aspects of systemic risk, the risk that banks fail together, are modeled and their interaction examined. First, the ex-post aspect, in which the failure of a bank brings down a surviving bank as well, and second, the ex-ante aspect, in which banks endogenously hold correlated portfolios...

The paper seeks to explain the huge cross country variation in private pension funding, shaped by historical choice made when universal pension systems were created after the Great Depression. According to Perotti and von Thadden (2006), large inflationary shocks due to war damage devastated...

We use portfolio theory to quantify the efficiency of state-level sectoral patterns of production in the United States. On the basis of observed growth in sectoral value added output, we calculate for each state the efficient frontier for investments in the real economy, the efficient Sharpe...

This paper focuses on bank rescue packages and on the behaviour of troubled banks in light of rescue offers. A puzzling feature of experience with banking crises is that in many cases policy authorities make offers of bank rescue, and banks are reluctant to accept these offers. We study...

We estimate the effects of deregulation of U.S. banking restrictions on the amount of interstate personal income insurance during the period 1970--2001. Interstate income insurance occurs when personal income reacts less than one-to-one to state-specific shocks to output. We find that income...

We analyse a model in which bank deposits are insured and there is an exogenous cost of bank capital. The former effect results in bank over-investment and the latter in under-investment. Regulatory capital requirements introduce investment distortions, which are a constrained optimal response...

We model the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, reserve holdings and aggregate liquidity. A merger creates an internal money market that affects reserve holdings and induces financial cost advantages, but also withdraws liquidity from the interbank market. We assess changes in liquidity...

Theory predicts that information sharing among lenders attenuates adverse selection and moral hazard, and can therefore increase lending and reduce default rates. To test these predictions, we construct a new international data set on private credit bureaus and public credit registers. We find...

Governments throughout Eastern Europe have been singularly unsuccessful in dealing with large loss-making SOEs. A more promising approach would create an incentive framework and legal environment where the SOE's major non-government creditor can take the lead in initiating restructuring and the...