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 …

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 …

operating in the United States and determined the cause of each bank suspension. This essay analyzes chronological patterns in … of bank distress. Periods of heightened distress were correlated with periods of increased illiquidity. Contagion via … correspondent networks and bank runs propagated the initial banking panics. As the depression deepened and asset values declined …

operating in the United States and determined the cause of each bank suspension. This essay introduces quarterly series derived …

of liquidation makes the private bank coalition incentive compatible, inducing banks to monitor each other. But, despite … the evolution of private bank coalitions, government central banks and government deposit insurance schemes historically … replaced the private bank coalitions. In this paper we ask why this transition from private arrangements to public arrangements …

emergency currency during a financial crisis and (2) the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 which established a central bank. We employ …

Reserve discount window through contacts with Federal Reserve members. We find that individual bank attributes related to the … that a bank's position within the interbank network (as a user or provider of liquidity) predicts the timing of its entry …