As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the 19th century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands, but...

As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the 19th century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands, but...

We focus on four previous systemic financial crises that the United States has experienced since 1870. These include the crisis of 1873 (called the Great Depression until the 1930s), the 1893 crisis, the panic of 1907, and the Great Depression. Given that all of the earlier crises predate the...

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...

Central bank lender of last resort (LOLR) regimes are the last line of defence before governments are forced to resort to taxpayer-funded bailouts of the financial system. Yet despite this important role, along with a rich theoretical literature examining the function and design of LOLR regimes,...

The federal banking agencies—the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—supervise. They work cooperatively with banks and their remedial powers are so extensive they rarely use them. Oversight is designed to proceed through...

This paper presents a new indicator on financial stress from 1889 to 2016 based on the reporting in five major US newspapers. This indicator provides detailed and high-frequency coverage of more than a century of financial history based on a previously untapped corpus of 35 million newspaper...

This paper sketches the evolution in the governance structures of railroad and industrial firms in the United States between 1850 and 1914. I describe how the largest of these corporations became controlled by salaried executives, with no board member willing to oversee manager actions....

If confronted with a major financial crisis in the first year (2017) of his or her first term, what should the new President do? This essay explores the history of some of the financial crises in the United States and offers lessons for the new administration to help it prepare for such events...

As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the nineteenth century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands,...