Search Results
Journal Article
Stock market booms and monetary policy in the twentieth century
This article examines the association between stock market booms and monetary policy in the United States and nine other developed countries during the 20th century. The authors find, as was true of the U.S. stock market boom of 1994-2000, that booms typically arose during periods of above-average growth of real output and below-average inflation, suggesting that booms reflected both real macroeconomic phenomena and monetary policy. They find little evidence that booms were fueled by excessive liquidity. Booms often ended within a few months of an increase in inflation and consequent monetary ...
Working Paper
Government policy and banking instability: \"overbanking\" in the 1920s
Excess capacity, or ?overbanking,? was cited by contemporaries as leading cause of bank failure during the 1920s. Many states that had high numbers of banks per capita in 1920 had high bank failure rates subsequently. This article finds that the number of banks per capita was highest in states that provided deposit insurance, set low minimum capital requirements, and restricted branching. Banks per capita declined the most over the 1920s in states where branching expanded, and in those suffering high failure rates because of falling incomes or instability caused by deposit insurance. Deposit ...
Working Paper
Which banks choose deposit insurance? Evidence of adverse and moral hazard in a voluntary insurance system
The sharp increase in depository institution failures in recent years has drawn attention to the moral hazard created by under-priced deposit insurance. To identify possible reforms, researchers have begun to consider alternative deposit insurance arrangements. This paper contributes to that literature by examining the deposit insurance system of Kansas, which operated from 1909 to 1929. The Kansas system had a number of regulations that were intended to limit risk-taking, and membership was made voluntary to assuage objections that insurance forces conservative banks to protect depositors of ...
Journal Article
Big banks in small places: are community banks being driven out of rural markets?
The shares of total U.S. banking assets and deposits held by the very largest banking organizations have increased markedly over the past 25 years, while the shares held by small ?community? banks have declined. Advances in information technology may have reduced the advantages of small scale, close proximity, and local ties that traditionally have given small, community-focused banks a competitive advantage in lending to small businesses and other ?informationally opaque? borrowers. This article examines trends in deposit shares of banks of different sizes in rural U.S. counties. If the ...
Working Paper
Interbank Connections, Contagion and Bank Distress in the Great Depression
Liquidity shocks transmitted through interbank connections contributed to bank distress during the Great Depression. New data on interbank connections reveal that banks were much more likely to close when their correspondents closed. Further, after the Federal Reserve was established, banks? management of cash and capital buffers was less responsive to network risk, suggesting that banks expected the Fed to reduce network risk. Because the Fed?s presence removed the incentives for the most systemically important banks to maintain capital and cash buffers that had protected against liquidity ...
Working Paper
Near-Money Premiums, Monetary Policy, and the Integration of Money Markets : Lessons from Deregulation
The 1960s and 1970s witnessed rapid growth in the markets for new money market instruments, such as negotiable certificates of deposit (CDs) and Eurodollar deposits, as banks and investors sought ways around various regulations affecting funding markets. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the deregulation and integration of the money markets. We find that the pricing and volume of negotiable CDs and Eurodollars issued were influenced by the availability of other short-term safe assets, especially Treasury bills. Banks appear to have issued these money market instruments as ...
Working Paper
Navigating Constraints: The Evolution of Federal Reserve Monetary Policy, 1935-59
The 1950s are often pointed to as a decade in which the Federal Reserve operated a particularly successful monetary policy. The present paper examines the evolution of Federal Reserve monetary policy from the mid-1930s through the 1950s in an effort to understand better the apparent success of policy in the 1950s. Whereas others have debated whether the Fed had a sophisticated understanding of how to implement policy, our focus is on how the constraints on the Fed changed over time. Roosevelt Administration gold policies and New Deal legislation limited the Fed's ability to conduct an ...
Journal Article
When will business lending pick up?
The recent declines in tightening of lending standards suggest that business lending may be poised for a rebound.
Working Paper
The Founding of the Federal Reserve, the Great Depression and the Evolution of the U.S. Interbank Network
Financial network structure is an important determinant of systemic risk. This paper examines how the U.S. interbank network evolved over a long and important period that included two key events: the founding of the Federal Reserve and the Great Depression. Banks established connections to correspondents that joined the Federal Reserve in cities with Fed offices, initially reducing overall network concentration. The network became even more focused on Fed cities during the Depression, as survival rates were higher for banks with more existing connections to Fed cities, and as survivors ...
Working Paper
Are credit unions too small?
Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600 percent. We use a non-parametric local-linear estimator to estimate a cost relationship for credit unions and derive estimates of ray-scale and expansion-path scale economies. We employ a dimension-reduction technique to reduce estimation error, and bootstrap methods for inference. We find substantial evidence of increasing returns to scale across the range of sizes observed among credit unions, suggesting that ...