A recurring citation in systemic risk literature reviews (P. Aghion, P. Bolton, and M. Dewatripont. 2000. “Contagious Bank Failures in a Free Banking System.” European Economic Review 44:713–18) offers a model where what they describe as a free banking system is vulnerable to contagious...

Selgin's Theorem -- that a free banking system operating on a fixed supply of commodity reserves acts to stabilize total nominal spending per year -- provides an analytical bridge between this alternative regime and conventional monetary theory. For a system of competing banks subject to...

Economic historians remain divided over America’s experiment with free banking during the antebellum era. Some argue that the reforms, which liberalized the bank-chartering process, simply exchanged one set of entry barriers for another, while others hold that free banking improved competition...