Usurers have been the first step to financial intermediation. Standing as financial intermediaries, they were carrying out the high risk not to be refunded the money granted as loans. But this high risk has always been remunerated by a high interest rate on loans granted. Banks institutions, as...

Even as banks have decreased their exposure to residential mortgage loans since 2008, bank exposure to leveraged lending has risen dramatically. The $1 trillion total asset leveraged loan market poses a significant and growing source of credit risk to U.S. depository institutions and investors....

An 1890s loan book of the Bank A. Levy permits a detailed examination of the lending operations of a private bank in California during the National Banking Era (1864-1914). This period has been intensively analyzed at the macroeconomic level, but there are few microeconomic studies of banks....

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went...

At the macro level, recent policy-relevant research establishes an association between credit booms and banking distress; the focus is on leverage. However, scant evidence is available at the micro level. This study analyses the relationship between lending growth, leverage, and distress at the...

Bank distress was a defining feature of the Great Depression in the United States. Most banks, however, weathered the storm and remained in operation throughout the contraction. We show that surviving banks cut lending when depositors withdrew funds en masse during panics. This panic-induced...

This paper shows that bank competition has an intrinsically ambiguous effect on capital accumulation and economic growth. We further demonstrate that banking market structure can be responsible for the emergence of development traps in economies that would otherwise be characterized by unique...

Incentive provision is a central question in modern economic theory. During the run up to the financial crisis, many banks attempted to encourage loan underwriting by giving out incentive packages to loan officers. Using a unique data set on small business loan officer compensation from a major...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

We examine the prudential implications of the co-existence between the standardized approach and the internal ratings-based (IRB) approach, as defined in the new Basle Accord. We consider a model in which sophisticated banks, eligible for the IRB approach, and unsophisticated banks, eligible for...