As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the 19th century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands, but...

In this paper, we exploit a natural experiment in which thrifts in several states witnessed an exogenous reduction in supervisory attention to assess the effect of supervision on financial institutions' willingness to take risk. We show that the affected institutions took on much more risk than...

I develop a model where the sovereign debt capacity depends on the capitalization of domestic banks. Low-capital banks optimally tilt their government bond portfolio toward domestic securities, linking their destiny to that of the sovereign. If the sovereign risk is sufficiently high,...

We modify the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model of banking to jointly study various regulations in the presence of credit and run risk. Banks choose between liquid and illiquid assets on the asset side, and between deposits and equity on the liability side. The endogenously determined asset...

We examine the role of U.S. monetary policy in global financial stability by using a cross-country database spanning the period from 1870-2010 across 69 countries. U.S. monetary policy tightening increases the probability of banking crises for those countries with direct linkages to the U.S.,...