Using a newly discovered dataset of U.S. bank suspensions from 1921 to 1929, we discovered that banking panics were more common in the 1920s than had been believed. Besides identifying panics, we investigate their determinants, finding that local banking panics were more likely when fundamental...

We examine whether corporate corruption scrutiny affects corporate investment in China. A corruption news index (CNI) containing firm-specific measures of corruption scrutiny is developed by tracking all articles in the press about corruption for all firms trading on the Shanghai and Shenzhen...

An extensive number of studies investigate the effects of political relations on trade by estimating a gravity model using annual (or quarterly) data. We argue that the use of low-frequency data introduces an aggregation bias because the cycle of moderate political shocks is much shorter...

On September 29, 2008, the House of Representatives voted to reject HR 3997 (known as the original $700 Billion Bailout Bill). On October 3, the House reversed course and voted to approve the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA). This paper applies a political voting model to...

This paper quantifies the short-term and long-term impact of bank supervision (measured using CAMEL composite and component ratings) on different categories of loan growth: (a) commercial and industrial loans, b) consumer loans, and (c) real estate loans. For each of these categories, we perform...

This paper provides empirical evidence documenting the existence of a credit channel during the pre-Depression era using a newly constructed, state-level quarterly time series from 1900Q1 through 1931Q2 for the 48 contiguous states. It also investigates the source and size of the credit channel,...

Theories of bank contagion often highlight the idea that financial crises frequently start as local shocks and then spread to other financial institutions. Conditions in Helena, Montana at the onset of the Panic of 1893 present an ideal laboratory for testing these theories. We use a unique...

This paper examines how the U.S. financial crisis of 1893 affected state output growth between 1900 and 1930. The results indicate that a 1% increase in bank instability reduces output growth by about 5%. A comparison of the cases of Nebraska, with one of the highest bank failure rates, and West...

We develop a monthly index of quot;badquot; news about China reported in the United States from January 1990 to December 2008. quot;Badquot; is defined as news touching on the following issues: human rights, Tibet, child labor, democracy, and repression. Using this bad news index, we document a...

Government-linked companies (GLCs) have a significant presence in Singapore's corporate sector. Unlike parastatals in many other countries, these companies are run on a competitive, commercial basis, ostensibly without government privileges. Based on data from publicly listed GLCs and non-GLCs,...