We exploit the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period to examine the impact of removing barriers to bank entry on bank competition and economic growth. As governments were not concerned about systemic stability in this period, we are able to isolate the...

Government intervention during the banking holiday of March 1933 resolved the uncertainty usually created by bank suspensions. Including banking holiday suspensions in growth regressions therefore biases downwards the estimates of the real effects of bank suspensions. In this paper, I propose a...