A new database demonstrates that between 1600 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by landholding and inheritance...

Eight states established deposit insurance systems between 1908 and 1917. All abandoned the systems between 1921 and 1930. Scholars debate the costs and benefits of these policy experiments. New data drawn from the archives of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors demonstrate that deposit...

Hooks and Robinson (2002) argue that deposit insurance in Texas during the 1920s induced banks to invest in riskier assets. Their regressions indicate that this manifestation of moral hazard may explain some of what happened, but not all. Some other mechanism, hitherto overlooked, must also have...

Bank distress was a defining feature of the Great Depression in the United States. Most banks, however, weathered the storm and remained in operation throughout the contraction. We show that surviving banks cut lending when depositors withdrew funds en masse during panics. This panic-induced...

Which firms relied on commercial banks for credit and which firms did not at the onset of the Great Depression would seem to be an important question given the vast literature discussing banking distress in the United States during the 1930s. The question, however, has not been answered. This...

Dun's Review began publishing monthly data on bankruptcies by branch of business during the 1890s. Those series evolved through many iterations. This essay reconstructs the series from 1895 to 1935 and discusses how it can be used for economic analysis