In 1962, Spain implemented significant banking law changes to boost competition. This study investigates their impact on provincial banking concentration from 1964 to 1975, utilising novel provincial-level private bank balance sheet data and including savings banks. Results show a substantial...

Over two decades from 1949 until the resumption of the diplomatic relations between these two countries in 1972, West German companies never gave up on the Chinese market despite substantial difficulties caused by Cold War frictions. This paper exams the payment transactions and terms of credits...

This working paper integrates the credit money approach (associated with Post Keynesian endogenous money theory) with the state money approach (associated with Modern Money Theory) by drawing on Wray's 1990 book (Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies: The Endogenous Money Approach, Edward...

We present a financial history of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) using a new dataset derived from the Bank of England minutes. We argue that the war and the associated actions of the Bank of England led to a transformation of the financial system. Additionally, while there was short-term...

Société Générale de Belgique was the world's first universal bank. It pioneered another innovation: investing in non-listed equity. We use hand-collected data to show that the bank earned significant positive risk-adjusted returns from 1850 to 1934. This offset its flat return on the listed...

We exploit the natural experiment of Japan’s opening to international trade to examine how comparative advantage can shape a country’s long-run path towards financial development. In the late 19th century, many of Japan’s prefectures had a natural comparative advantage in silk reeling....

This article undertakes a critical comparison of two books­-Private Banking in Europe: Rise, Retreat, and Resurgence by Youssef Cassis and Philip Cottrell, and Financial Elites and European Banking: Historical Perspectives, edited by Youssef Cassis and Giuseppe Telesca-to explore how different...

Monti di Pietà were first founded in the 1460s as public banks whose aim was to provide citizens with solidaristic credit. In this institution, the interplay between the objects pawned and the small money loans granted in exchange was vital and mediated by a wellorganized paper "ecosystem" of...

In the 1980s, Commerzbank was increasingly forced to become much more international if it wanted to be perceived as a relevant player in the field of investment banking, which was considered particularly attractive. This article focuses on the bank's initially cautious, then strongly accelerated...

Monti di Pietà were first founded in the 1460s as public banks whose aim was to provide citizens with solidaristic credit. In this institution, the interplay between the objects pawned and the small money loans granted in exchange was vital and mediated by a wellorganized paper "ecosystem" of...

In this article, I use documents obtained from the NatWest Group archives to examine the work of Alexander Shand as a director of Parr's Bank during the period 1909-1918. A Scottish banker, Alexander Shand was recruited by the Japanese government early in his career to instruct Japanese...

Previous research has documented the importance and persistence of social norms, but there is limited understanding of whether they are capable of changing in the short run. Utilizing data from Sweden and Denmark, this article addresses this gap by testing whether significant local shocks may...

"The making of a central bank-and of America's financial contingency plans. The long-standing description of the Federal Reserve as a "lender of last resort" refers to the central bank's provision of emergency liquidity for banks and financial entities in periods of crisis. As economist Mark...

Central banks have always been important actors in the formation of nation-states and national identities. The idea of a central bank has been historically linked to the economic development of states, implementation of money-credit policy, guaranteeing financial stability, and a strong national...

"How regulating the banks became a separate and strange category of government power. Banks are unlike most other businesses, and over centuries, regulating banks has become a category of government power all its own. For some, the appropriate role of those supervising the banks approximates...

We examine historical banking crises through the lens of bank equity declines, which cover a broad sample of episodes of banking distress both with and without banking panics. To do this, we construct a new dataset on bank equity returns and narrative information on banking panics for 46...

The free-banking history of Switzerland is subdivided into periods with unfettered competition (1826–1881), and strict banknote regulation (1881–1907). This paper suggests that the Federal Banknote Act of 1881 was introduced to remedy the fragmentation of the unfettered-competition period,...

Maintaining sufficient liquidity in the financial system is vital for its stability. However, since returns on liquid assets are typically low, individual financial institutions may seek to hold fewer such assets, especially if they believe they can rely on other institutions for liquidity...

Basel III credit-to-GDP gap indicators are used to assess whether aggregate credit is excessive or not and inform macroprudential policymaking. Yet, estimates from Basel III’s prescribed detrending procedure are prone to continuous re-evaluations that do not reflect changes in the data and...