This paper examines the impacts of banking market structure and regulation on economic growth using new data on banking market concentration and manufacturing industry-level growth rates for U.S. states during 1899-1929 — a period when the manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly and...

Federal bank supervision began in the United States with the enactment of the National Bank Act in 1863. From that point until the banking crises of the 1930s, the leaders of the US supervisory agencies—the Comptroller of the Currency (1863) and the Federal Reserve (1913)—recognized that...

This study reports estimates of the marginal benefits and costs of increasing the regulatory minimum bank equity-to-asset “leverage ratio” from 4 to 15 percent. Benefits arise from reducing the probability of a banking crisis. Costs arise from reduced lending, should banks pass off higher...

Annual time series data show that from 1790 through 2010 only about 1 percent of U.S. commercial banks failed each year on average. Many community banks, including mutual savings banks and local commercial banks, provided valuable intermediation services for decades before failing or, more...

Three types of banks, community (small, relationship-based), mega (very large, transaction-based), and goldilocks (middling, mix of relationship and transaction-based) are surveyed throughout U.S. banking history. Megabanks are relatively new and while they pose threats to macroeconomic...

Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This article answers this question by analysing the effect of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s on 142 banks, of which 33 failed. We find that choices of balance sheet composition and product market strategy made in the...