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 …

This paper examines the impact of banking deregulation on growth in the U.S. Many states relaxed restrictions on intra …-state bank branching beginning in the early 1960s, both by allowing bank holding companies to convert subsidiaries into branches … intermediaries to become more efficient. The existing literature suggests that one of the channels through which this worked was bank …