In this paper we revisit the debate over the role of the banking panics in 1930-33 in precipitating the Great Contraction. The issue hinges over whether the panics were illiquidity shocks and hence in support of Friedman and Schwartz (1963) greatly exacerbated the recession which had begun in...

The financial crisis of 2008 engulfed the banking system of the United States and many large European countries. Canada was a notable exception. In this paper we argue that the structure of financial systems is path dependent. The relative stability of the Canadian banks in the recent crisis...

This essay shows that government credit-allocation schemes generate incentive conflicts that undermine the quality of bank supervision and eventually produce banking crisis. For political reasons, most countries establish a regulatory culture that embraces three economically contradictory...

This paper explains the puzzle of how a developing economy can shift from a path of reasonable growth before a financial crisis, as in Mexico in 1994, to a sharp decline in economic activity after a crisis occurs. It does so by outlining an asymmetric information framework for analyzing banking...

Even after controlling for local economic conditions, differences in state bank supervision and regulation contribute toward explaining the large variation in state bank suspension rates across U.S. counties during the Great Depression. More stringent capital requirements lowered suspension...

This paper documents and explains the near-permanent banking stress African countries have experienced during the last 20 years. The central hypothesis is that banking stress comes predominantly from unbooked losses and that the level of unbooked losses a banking system can accumulate depends on...

Both investors and borrowers are concerned about liquidity. Investors desire liquidity because they are uncertain about when they will want to eliminate their holding of a financial asset. Borrowers are concerned about liquidity because they are uncertain about their ability to continue to...

In recent years the possibility of an international financial crisis has increased because of greater liquidity of international financial markets, an increase in corporate indebtedness and the decline of the banking industry. Using an asymmetric information analysis, this paper outlines what...

Weaknesses in banking systems are rooted in government credit-allocation preferences that prove unsupportable in private markets. Losses that preferential loans impose on lending banks and on the governmental safety net can be covered up for awhile, but not indefinitely. A silent run begins when...

We analyze a variant of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model of banking in which savers can use a bank to invest in a risky project operated by an entrepreneur. The savers can buy equity in the bank and save via deposits. The bank chooses to invest in a safe asset or to fund the entrepreneur. The...