Search Results
Working Paper
Bank liability insurance schemes before 1865
Prior to the Civil War several states established bank liability insurance schemes of two basic types. One was an insurance fund, in which member banks paid into a state-run fund that would pay losses of bank creditors. The other was a mutual guarantee system, in which survivor banks were legally responsible the liabilities of any bank that became insolvent. Both schemes did well at insuring bank creditors, but neither prevented bank panics. Bank failure rates were somewhat higher for banks that were part of these schemes. The experience with these schemes shows that regulatory incentives ...
Working Paper
Will the new $100 bill decrease counterfeiting?
A current U.S. policy is to introduce a new style of currency that is harder to counterfeit, but not immediately to withdraw from circulation all of the old-style currency. This policy is analyzed in a random-matching model of money, and its potential to decrease counterfeiting in the long run is shown. For various parameters of the model, three types of equilibria are found to occur. In only one does counterfeiting continue at its initial high level. In the other two, both genuine and counterfeit old-style money go out of circulation - immediately in one and gradually in the other. There are ...
Journal Article
New $10 note to debut in early 2006
Working Paper
European hoarding: currency use among immigrants in Switzerland
Do immigrants have a higher demand for large denominated banknotes than natives? This study examines whether cash orders for CHF 1000 notes, a banknote not used for daily transactions, is concentrated in Swiss cities with a high foreign-to-native ratio. Controlling for a range of socio-economic indicators across 250 Swiss cities, European immigrants in Switzerland are found to hoard less CHF 1000 banknotes than natives. A 1 percent increase in the immigrant-to-native ratio leads to a reduction in currency orders by CHF 4000. This negative correlation between immigrant-to-native ratio and ...
Working Paper
The efficiency of private e-money-like systems: the U.S. experience with state bank notes
In the United States prior to 1863, each bank issued its own distinct notes. E-money shares many of the characteristics of these bank notes. This paper describes some lessons relevant to e-money from the U.S. experience with state bank notes. It examines historical evidence on how well the bank notes?a privately issued currency system with multiple issuers?functioned with respect to ease of transacting, counterfeiting, safety, overissuance, and par exchange. It finds that bank notes made transacting easier and were not subject to overissuance. However, counterfeiting of bank notes was ...
Report
Were U.S. state banknotes priced as securities?
This study examines the pricing of U.S. state banknotes before 1860 using data on the discounts on these notes as quoted in banknote reporters in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. The study attempts to determine whether these banknotes were priced consistent with their expected net redemption value - that is, as securities are. It finds that they are not. A bank's notes did have higher prices when the bank was redeeming its notes for specie than when it was not, and banknote prices generally reflected the distances necessary to travel in order to redeem the notes, with larger ...
Report
Explaining the demand for free bank notes
This paper explains why the risky notes of banks established during the Free Banking Era (1837?63) were demanded even when relatively safe specie (gold and silver coin) was an alternative. Free bank notes were demanded because they were priced to reflect the expected value of their backing. The empirical evidence supports this explanation. Specifically, in New York, Wisconsin, and Indiana the expected value of backing was sufficient for free bank notes to circulate at par, which they did. In Minnesota the backing for notes was very poor: they exchanged well below par, being treated as ...
Working Paper
A model of banknote discounts
Prior to 1863, state-chartered banks in the United States issued notes - dollar-denominated promises to pay specie to the bearer on demand. Although these notes circulated at par locally, they usually were quoted at a discount outside the local area. These discounts varied by both the location of the bank and the location where the discount was being quoted. Further, these discounts were asymmetric across locations, meaning that the discounts quoted in location A on the notes of banks in location B generally differed from the discounts quoted in location B on the notes of banks in location A. ...
Discussion Paper
Private money and reserve management in a random-matching model
In this paper, we develop a model of money and reserve-holding banks. We allow for private liabilities to circulate as media of exchange in a random-matching framework. Some individuals, which we identify as banks, are endowed with a technology to issue private notes and to keep reserves with a clearinghouse. Bank liabilities are redeemed according to a stochastic process that depends on the endogenous trades. We find conditions under which note redemptions act as a force that is sufficient to stabilize note issue by the banking sector.