We employ proprietary data from a large bank to analyze how - in times of crisis - depositors react to a bank nationalization, re-privatization and an accompanying increase in deposit insurance. Nationalization slows depositors fleeing the bank, provided they have sufficient trust in the...

This paper examines the Swedish record of competition in the supply of bank notes in the 19th century. Between 1831 and 1902, private commercial banks, organized as partnerships with unlimited liability for their owners, issued notes competing with the notes of the Riksbank, the bank owned by...

Large universal banks played a major role for Germany's industrialisation because they provided loans to the industry and thereby helped firms to overcome liquidity constraints. Previous research has also argued that they were equally important on the German stock market. The present paper...

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...

Pawnbroking, one of the oldest and most accessible forms of credit, was a common feature of life in pre-famine and famine Ireland. This paper studies the role of pawnbroking in the Irish financial system during this important period, applying insights from modern studies on fringe banking to...

The German financial system rests on three distinct pillars - this position has been widely accepted among bank historians. However, this view neglects another important pillar, namely the financial institutions under the rule and control of state authorities. The following article aims to...

We employ proprietary data from a large bank to analyze how – during crisis – deposit insurance affects depositor behavior. Our focus is on Belgium where the government increased explicit deposit insurance coverage and implemented implicit deposit insurance arrangements. Estimating sorting...

The paper puts the outcome during the most recent financial crisis in a historical perspective by taking a closer look at the frequency of extreme events in the economic history of Denmark, in some cases based on time series back to the late 1600s. We focus on the frequency distribution of a...

Two features of the history of Hamburg as a financial centre are of particular interest from the perspective of a central bank: The estab-lishment of Hamburger Bank in 1619 as a proto-central bank and the handling of two liquidity or financial crises in the 19th century. Hamburger Bank provided...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of UK banking crises over the period 1750 to 1938. We construct a new annual banking crisis series using bank failure rate data, which suggests that the incidence of banking crises was every 32 years. Using our new series and a narrative approach...