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 transition from private bank notes, the predominant form of money before the U.S. Civil …

of creating an oligopoly. We assembled a data set that compares bank failures, lending rates, interest paid on deposits …

This paper provides the first comprehensive econometric analysis of the causes of bank distress during the Depression …. We assemble bank-level data for virtually all Fed member banks, and combine those data with county-level, state … bank failure. We construct a model of bank survival duration using these fundamental determinants of bank failure as …

We use a novel data set spanning 1820-1910 to examine the origins of bank supervision and assess factors leading to the … creation of formal bank supervision across U.S. states. We show that it took more than a century for the widespread adoption of …

cross-county variation in fertility levels and for potential spatial correlation, we find that the presence of a bank and …

It is often argued that branching stabilizes banking systems by facilitating diversification of bank portfolios … quantitatively more important than geographical diversification for bank stability in the 1920s and 1930s …

We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the … effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find that where entry was more restricted the cost of credit was … increase in bad loans. In provinces where restrictions to bank competition were most severe, the proportion of bad loans after …