This paper analyzes the determinants of spreads on syndicated bank lending to emerging markets, treating the loan-extension and pricing decisions as jointly determined. Compared to the bond market, our findings highlight the role of international banks in providing credit to smaller borrowers...

The following paper describes the emergence of cooperative mortgage credit associations, called "Landschaften" in 18th century Prussia, and thereby tells the history of mortgage-covered bonds. Landschaften facilitated the refinancing of loans for Prussian estates by issuing covered bonds...

Although bank supervision under the National Banking System exercised a light hand and panics were frequent, depositor losses were minimal. Double liability induced shareholders to carefully monitor bank managers and voluntarily liquidate banks early if they appeared to be in trouble. Inducing...

In the summer of 1931, a financial crisis began in Austria, spread to Germany, forced Britain to abandon the gold standard, crossed the Atlantic, and afflicted financial institutions in the United States. This article describes how banks in New York City, the central money market of the United...

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...

The United States was the first nation to allow open access to the corporate form to its citizens. The state of Massachusetts was not only one of the first states to provide its members with legally sanctioned tools to create organizations and enable open access but, on a per capita basis, had...

Early American firms were shaped by contemporary social conceptions of appropriate horizontal power relations inside the firm and the Federalist era bank was shaped by these conceptions. The Federalist era debate on the corporation was much broader than how shareholders would treat with one...

Because California was a pioneer in the development of intrastate branching, we use its experience during the 1920s and 1930s to assess the effects of the expansion of large-scale, branch-banking networks on competition and the stability of banking systems. Using a new database of individual...