We examine historical banking crises through the lens of bank equity declines, which cover a broad sample of episodes … of banking distress both with and without banking panics. To do this, we construct a new dataset on bank equity returns … of panics, large bank equity declines are associated with substantial credit contractions and output gaps. While panics …

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 …

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 …

quality of bank assets and management. All three types of information were useful for gauging the condition of the bank, and … affected bank behavior, including a publicly observable signal (skipping a dividend payment). Participants in the market for … bank liabilities reacted to this signal in ways that promoted market discipline …

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

that centers on the existence of an increasingly efficient market for bank shares. The stock market was important because …