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 effects of bank competition from those of state implicit guarantees. We … find that the introduction of free banking laws stimulated the creation of new banks and led to more bank failures. Our …

We use a novel, household opinions-based measure – Public Confidence in a Bank – to explore the role of bank-level and … banks publicly monitored during 2010–2017. We find that public confidence in a bank is highly sensitive to the industry …-level financial stability indicators, but less sensitive to bank-level risk characteristics. This result reveals an important role of …