This chapter explores the political economy of banking in Texas at the turn of the last century. The empirical work sheds light on why Texans voted to allow the chartering of banks by the state government. The evidence shows that county-level voting patterns for state-chartered banks were...

Using recently collected examination data from a sample of Texas state-chartered banks over the period 1919-26, the role of moral hazard in increasing ex-ante asset risk is analyzed. During this period, a state-run deposit insurance system was in place that was mandatory for all state-chartered...

In 1910, Texas instituted a highly unique deposit insurance program for its state chartered banks consisting of two separate plans: the depositors guaranty fund, similar in operation to the deposit insurance schemes adopted in several other states; and the depositors bond security system, which...

In his comment on our 2002 Journal of Economic History paper, Gary Richardson (2007) proposes that our work specifies moral hazard too narrowly. Richardson posits that fixed-rate deposit insurance leads to moral hazard which takes many forms. These include not only the usual notion of...