Cooperatively-owned Raiffeisen banks first emerged in the Netherlands in the late 1890s and spread rapidly across the country. Using a new dataset, we investigate the determinants of their market entry and early performance. We find that the cooperative organisational form, when allied to a...

In this paper we analyze the effect of bank capital on lending expansion and contraction for nearly 150 years in Spain. We fi rst build up thoroughly a measure of bank leverage (i.e. the capital to assets ratio) for the Spanish banking sector starting in year 1880. Then, we run a proper...

We study how relationships between firms and banks evolved between during the Twentieth century in Britain. We document and explain a remarkable transition from single to multiple firm-bank relationships during the last twenty years of the sample period. Larger, global, or transparent companies...

This paper contributes to literature on bank distress using the Swedish experience of the international crisis of 1907, often paralleled with 2008. By employing previously unanalyzed bank-level data, we use logit regressions and principal component analysis to measure the impact of pre-crisis...

In this paper, we analyze the role bank capital played in systemic banking crises and in lending expansion and contraction for nearly 150 years in Spain. We first build a measure of capital ratio (i.e., the capital to assets ratio) for Spain's banking sector, starting in 1880. Then, we analyze...

This paper studies the effects of interest rate restrictions on loan allocation. In 1714, the British government tightened the usury laws, reducing the maximum permissible interest rate from 6 to 5 percent. A sample of individual loan transactions from a goldsmith bank allows us to examine how...