The sharp increase in depository institution failures in recent years has drawn attention to the moral hazard created by under-priced deposit insurance. To identify possible reforms, researchers have begun to consider alternative deposit insurance arrangements. This paper contributes to that...

State per capita incomes became more disperse during the contraction phase of the Great Depression, and less disperse during the recovery phase. We investigate the effects of spatial dependence, industrial composition, bank failures and fiscal policies on state income growth during each phase....

This paper draws on the experiences of the United States and European Community to speculate on the effects of agreements to integrate high and low income economies. The evidence suggests that reducing barriers to the flow of goods or resources will promote convergence, even among integrating...

Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600 percent. We use a non-parametric local-linear estimator to estimate a cost relationship for credit unions and...

Excess capacity, or “overbanking,” was cited by contemporaries as leading cause of bank failure during the 1920s. Many states that had high numbers of banks per capita in 1920 had high bank failure rates subsequently. This article finds that the number of banks per capita was highest in...

This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal Reserve check processing offices over 1980–2003. We extend results from Park et al. (2000) and Daouia and Simar (2007) to develop an unconditional, hyperbolic, a-quantile estimator of efficiency. Our new estimator is fully...

The federal tax code creates challenges for comparing the profit rates of different banks on a consistent basis. The earnings of banks that elect to operate under subchapter S of the federal tax code are not subject to federal corporate income tax, but shareholders of these "S-banks" are taxed...