We use the German Crisis of 1931, a key event of the Great Depression, to study how depositors behave during a bank run in the absence of deposit insurance. We find that deposits decline by around 20 percent during the run and that there is an equal outflow of retail and nonfinancial wholesale...

Better customer service provisions by banks - such as more branches and ATMs, longer business hours, and more personalized services - help attract more core deposits and increase funding stickiness by raising depositors' switching costs and enhancing their loyalty. Funding stickiness from...

Prior to the Great Depression, regulators imposed double liability on bank shareholders to ensure financial stability and protect depositors. Under double liability, shareholders of failing banks lost their initial investment and had to pay up to the par value of the stock in order to compensate...

We examine how investors' perception of bank balance sheet risk evolved before and during the March-April 2023 bank run. To do so, we estimate the covariance ("beta") of bank excess stock returns with returns on factors constructed from long-short portfolios sorted on shares of uninsured...

Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1865 through 2023 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive non-core funding....

What are the effects of payout restrictions on bank risk-shifting? To answer this question, we exploit the restriction policies imposed during the Covid-crisis on US banks as a natural experiment. Using a highfrequency differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that, when share...

We study the Green and Lin (2003) model of financial intermediation with two new features: traders may face a cost of contacting the intermediary, and consumption needs may be correlated across traders. We show that each feature is capable of generating an equilibrium in which some (but not all)...

We track 38,000 money market trades from execution to delivery and return to provide a first empirical analysis of settlement delays in financial markets. In line with predictions from recent models showing that financial claims are settled strategically, we document a tendency by lenders to...

The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about the governance of banks. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing board governance using a sample of banking firm data that spans forty years. We examine the relationship between board structure (size and...

This paper considers the welfare effects of introducing a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. We study the planner’s problem to get a better understanding of the economic role of an LSM and find that an LSM can achieve the planner’s...