Although there is little doubt that banks between the wars were the victims of deflation, deflation alone cannot explain the cross-national distribution of banking crisis. In addition, one must take into consideration cross-country variations in banking structures -- the degree to which banks...

State banking, defined as the intervention of the state in the allocation of credit, became important in some countries during the postwar era but not in others, and then more or less disappeared in the 1980s. The purpose of the article is to develop an explanation for longitudinal and...