In the early 1990s, after decades of high inflation and financial repression, Argentina embarked on a course of macroeconomic and bank regulatory reform. Bank regulatory policy promoted privatization, financial liberalization, and free entry, limited safety net support, and established a novel...

Deposit insurance reduces liquidity risk but it also can increase insolvency risk by encouraging reckless behavior. A handful of U.S. states installed deposit insurance laws before the creation of the FDIC in 1933, and those laws only applied to some depository institutions within those states....

After an unprecedented number of banks suspended operations during the Panic of 1893, the head regulator of banks chartered by the United States government allowed about 100 banks to reopen after certifying their solvency. We evaluate whether actions by bank owners to change management, contract...

What is the optimal number of currencies in the world? Common currencies affect trading costs and, thereby, the amounts of trade, output, and consumption. From the perspective of monetary policy, the adoption of another country's currency trades off the benefits of commitment to price stability...

This paper addresses two questions: (1) Is a twelve country monetary union in Europe feasible; (2) Can monetary union be achieved at multi-speed, i.e., with a rust group of countries going first, and later admitting the others? After examining several politico-economic arguments concerning...

This paper studies how the creation of a European Central Bank (ECB) will change the political economy of monetary policy in Europe. The twelve governors of the national Central Banks of the EEC have recently proposed a statute for the ECB which delineates its institutional structure. In this...

We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...

This paper investigates whether or not the adoption of the Euro has facilitated the introduction of structural reforms, defined as deregulation in the product markets and liberalization and deregulation in the labor markets. After reviewing the theoretical arguments that may link the adoption of...

The merger of Fleet and BankBoston in September 1999 resulted in a regional New England lending market in which only one large, universal bank remained. We explore the extent to which that merger resulted in monopoly rents for the combined entity in some niches within the regional loan market....

In this paper, we present our view of the recent evolution of European integration. We first briefly describe the main features of the institution and decision making process in the European Union, with particular attention to the debate between federalists and super nationalists. We then...