This paper tests whether deposit insurance promotes financial depth by influencing depositor behavior. To do so, we rely on two schemes operating in the U.S. during the 1920s: the Postal Savings System and the deposit insurance schemes that some states had adopted. We exploit the discontinuity...

The lack of universal deposit insurance coverage can create liquidity risk during financial crises. This aspect of deposit insurance is hard to test in modern data because of the broad coverage of most systems. We, therefore, study the role that the U.S. Postal Savings System played in...

This paper tests whether deposit insurance promotes financial depth by influencing depositor behavior. To do so, we rely on two schemes operating in the U.S. during the 1920s: the Postal Savings System and the deposit insurance schemes that some states had adopted. We exploit the discontinuity...