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...

Previous studies of entry under New York's free banking law of 1838 have generated conflicting results. This article shows that different measures of entry lead to different conclusions about the competitive effects of the law. Measured by the entry of new banks, New York's free banking law led...