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Working Paper
Further evidence on the link between finance and growth: an international analysis of community banking and economic performance
We try to contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth, and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993-2000 on 49 nations. Data from both developed and developing nations suggest that greater market shares and efficiency ranks of small, private, domestically-owned banks are associated with better economic performance, and that the marginal benefits of higher shares are greater when the banks are more efficient. Only mixed ...
Journal Article
Monetary explanations of the Great Depression: a selective survey of empirical evidence
Seventy years after the Great Depression, economists still debate the causes of this economic catastrophe. Two leading explanations are distinguished by whether or not the Federal Reserve?s monetary policies are perceived as being chiefly responsible for propagating and magnifying the initial contraction into a depression. ; This article surveys recent modeling efforts and empirical work that examine aggregate explanations for the Great Depression from both the extensive literature using vector autoregression techniques and the more recent literature using dynamic stochastic general ...
Working Paper
Suspension of payments, bank failures, and the nonbank public's losses
Arguably, eliminating suspensions of payments--periods when banks jointly refuse to convert their liabilities into outside money or other assets--was an important impetus for creating the Federal Reserve. Friedman and Schwartz suggest that a suspension in 1930 would have decreased the severity of the Great Depression. More recently, an emerging literature suggests that suspensions of payments may well be optimal in some states of the world. We present evidence about suspensions of payments from an episode that is close to a controlled experiment for examining their effects. In 1861, about 44 ...
Working Paper
Central bank institutional structure and effective central banking: cross-country empirical evidence
Over the last decade, the legal and institutional frameworks governing central banks and financial market regulatory authorities throughout the world have undergone significant changes. This has created new interest in better understanding the roles played by organizational structures, accountability, and transparency, in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of central banks in achieving their objectives and ultimately yielding better economic outcomes. Although much has been written pointing out the potential role institutional form can play in central bank performance, little ...
Working Paper
Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods
In this article we analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. We suggest that the level of cross-border holdings of long-term securities between the United States and the rest of the world may indicate a direct link between the turmoil in the securitized market originated in the United States and that in other countries. We provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several Economics and Operations Research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or ...
Working Paper
Corporate social responsibility and shareholder's value: an event study analysis
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly a core component of corporate strategy in the global economy. In recent years its importance has become even greater, primarily because of the financial scandals, investors? losses, and reputational damage to listed companies. While corporations are busy adopting and enhancing CSR practices, there is (beyond very few notable exceptions) no established empirical research on CSR?s impact and relevance in the capital market. This paper investigates this issue by tracing the market reaction to corporate entry and exit from the Domini 400 ...
Conference Paper
Suspension of payments and bank failures
Working Paper
Contagious bank runs in the free banking period
In the free banking period in the United States, banks issued private banknotes without discretionary restriction of entry into banking. Previous research suggests that specific aspects of the free banking laws account for banks' difficulties, losses to noteholders, and the attendant relatively large number of banks closed. In this paper, we examine the hypothesis that contagious is: 1. the actual sequence of events in two episodes in which numerous banks closed; and 2. a statistical analysis of four episodes. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that contagious bank runs account of ...