The early 20th century United States provides an opportunity to determine whether imposing capital requirements on commercial banks promotes banking stability in the long run. The structure of the national banking system facilitates inference using a regression discontinuity design. The...

I examine the Neapolitan public banks, a group of non-profit institutions that emerged in the late sixteenth century, in the context of the early public banks that existed elsewhere in early modern Europe. In terms of size and stability they compare well with their peers, in spite of a difficult...