We investigate the relationships of bank failures and balance sheet conditions with measures of proximity to different forms of transportation in the United States over the period from 1830-1860. A series of hazard models and bank-level regressions indicate a systematic relationship between...

Real interest rates rose to historically high levels in 1980 and remained high throughout the decade. Macroeconomists attribute this phenomenon to a combination of tight monetary policy, fiscal deficits, and variable inflation rates. This paper presents preliminary evidence for an additional...

This paper implements a liquidity measure, “Liquidity Mismatch Index (LMI),” to gauge the mismatch between the market liquidity of assets and the funding liquidity of liabilities. We construct the LMIs for 2882 bank holding companies during 2002-2014 and investigate the time-series and...

The introduction of the direct reduction (fully-amortized) loan contract to the U.S. residential mortgage market is an important instance of financial innovation. We describe the adoption of this contract within the building and loan (B&L) industry beginning in the 1880s and culminating in the...

The 1980s S&L debacle is generally viewed as the result of: (1) sharply rising interest rates eliminating the net worth of thrifts funding fixed-rate loans with short-term deposits and (2) thrifts responding by taking even greater interest-rate and credit risks. The question investigated in this...

During the Great Depression, Building and Loans (B&Ls), the leading home lenders, had a structure that mitigated the crisis. Borrowers were owners of the B&L and dissolution of the institution required a two-thirds majority vote. Using panel data from New Jersey in the 1930s, we find that this...

This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing; a government policy that is designed to mitigate risk through central bank purchases of privately held risky assets and their replacement by government debt, with a return that is guaranteed by the taxpayer. Policies of this kind have...

We study whether the socially optimal level of stability of the banking system can be implemented with regulatory capital requirements in a multi-period general equilibrium model of banking. We show that: (i) bank capital is costly because of the unique liquidity services provided by demand...

This paper develops a model of bank asset and liability management, based on the idea that information problems make it difficult for banks to raise funds with instruments other than insured deposits. The model can be used to address the question of how monetary policy works. One effect it...

Central banking is intimately related to liquidity provision to banks during times of crisis, the lender-of-last-resort function. This activity arose endogenously in certain banking systems. Depositors lack full information about the value of bank assets so that during macroeconomic downturns...