The diversity of voting rules in today's corporations indicates that power is distributed among shareholders in a great variety of ways, but current theories of the corporation have little to say about this diversity. For insight into the significance of different ways of distributing power...

The onset of the American Civil War forced both the Confederate and Union governments to swiftly develop strategies to fund their military efforts. Focusing on the Confederacy's financial policies, I take up the following puzzle: Why did the Confederacy rely almost exclusively on inflation...

Bank regulators consider minimum capital standards essential for promoting well-functioning banking systems. Despite their existence, however, such standards have been insufficient to prevent periodic disruptions in the banking sectors of various countries. The most recent disruption was the...

In 1837-38, the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada rebelled. The rebellion was most virulent in the latter of the two colonies. Historians have argued that economic consideration were marginal in explaining the causes of the rebellions. To make this claim, they argue that the areas that...

In a recent NBER paper, Cutsail and Grubb argue that North Carolina's colonial bills of credit were valued like discount bonds, with a current market value largely determined by the discounted value of the bills when paid into the treasury in taxes or other public payments. Grubb has previously...

This study reports estimates of the marginal benefits and costs of increasing the regulatory minimum bank equity-to-asset “leverage ratio” from 4 to 15 percent. Benefits arise from reducing the probability of a banking crisis. Costs arise from reduced lending, should banks pass off higher...

Through the nineteenth century numerous U.S. states developed extensive municipal fiscal constitutions. These generally came in the wake of financial crises and large-scale default of public debts. Although the constraints were imposed in order to minimize the likelihood that such outcomes would...

I exploit variation in the adoption of disclosure and supervisory regulation across U.S. states to examine their impact on the development and stability of commercial banks. The empirical results suggest that the adoption of state‐level requirements to report financial statements in local...

In a recent article in the Economic History Review, Celia and Grubb liken colonial Maryland's dollar-denominated bills of credit to discount securities, circulating at less than their face value. This note argues that the bills in question circulated at par with specie and were treated as...

This is an unpublished comment on a Perkin's paper that surveyed banking in colonial America. It argues that historians have overlooked a number of abortive banking schemes in the colonies, implying that the absence of banks was not an "entrepreneurial failure." and that the extension of the...