We use the German Crisis of 1931, a key event of the Great Depression, to study how depositors behave during a bank run in the absence of deposit insurance. We find that deposits decline by around 20 percent during the run and that there is an equal outflow of retail and nonfinancial wholesale...

This short note is a description of the dataset compiled during the drafting of Cash and Dash: How ATMs and Computers Changed Banking (Oxford University Press, 2018). The full dataset is deposited with the European Association for Banking and Financial History, and is available for download from...

Current theories of financial regulation suggest expanding rules-based formal state intervention to promote international banking stability. Such policy solutions should then be global in scope. This article instead argues that principles-based informal co- and self-regulation through domestic...

This essay discusses trends in new banking history scholarship. It does so by conducting bibliometric content analysis of the entire literature involving the history of banks, bankers and banking published in all major academic journals since the year 2000. It places this recent scholarship in...

The very phrase "League of Nations" is a metaphor for international organizational failure. In the wake of the war it was designated to prevent, the League became the example to be avoided in building new multilateral institutions. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that our textbooks on...

In this article, I review the role of the IMF in the global crisis and argue that the Fund has emerged as a powerful institutional force, providing analysis and recommendations that have served as the basis of official action on several fronts. By contrast, the Fund was barking up the wrong tree...

The Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust is the oldest surviving closed end fund, having been established in 1868. Its early success and emulation were related to its identification of a missing market - the provision of a wholesale diversified vehicle for the investing public. This paper is a...

I use the global crisis of 1914 as a window onto the phenomenon of investor reaction to complex news — such as sudden political upheaval. Based on a novel database of all stocks traded on the NYSE during 1914, along with “real-time” news accounts from major newspapers, I show that NYSE...

Art is often presented as an investment of last resort or a potential safe haven in times of political or financial distress. Yet, as no study has focused on the performance of art markets in times of crisis, this paper fills this gap by means of unclosing historical auction archives. We trace...