Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes...

In this paper we compare the performance of the U.S. and Canadian banking systems from 1870-1925 in terms of stability and efficiency. In an earlier study we found that the Canadian banking system, based on nationwide branch banking, dominated the U.S. system, based on unit banking, on both...

The "Federalist financial revolution" may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that...

We study interbank lending and asset sales markets in which banks with surplus liquidity have market power vis-à-vis banks needing liquidity, frictions arise in lending due to moral hazard, and assets are bank-specific. Surplus banks ration lending and instead purchase assets from needy banks,...

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand,...

We exploit the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period to examine the impact of removing barriers to bank entry on bank competition and economic growth. As governments were not concerned about systemic stability in this period, we are able to isolate the...

Modern central banks have come to view payment systems as a key area of strategic interest, both as part of their responsibilities for financial stability and for the implementation of monetary policy. By considering the evolution of interbank settlement arrangements and central banking...

Valuation-based market timing demonstrates greater potential to improve risk-adjusted returns for conservative long-term investors than given credit by Fisher and Statman (2006). On a risk-adjusted basis, market-timing strategies provide comparable returns as a 100 percent stocks buy-and-hold...

This paper examines the relationship between the structure of banking markets and economic growth using a new dataset on manufacturing industry-level growth rates and banking market concentration for U.S. states during 1899-1929--a period when the manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly and...

The rapid growth of deposits in New York City over the three decades following the Civil War is often attributed to the release of pent-up demand for the services that transactions accounts could provide. I advance a complementary explanation that centers on the existence of an increasingly...