This chapter explores the political economy of banking in Texas at the turn of the last century. The empirical work sheds light on why Texans voted to allow the chartering of banks by the state government. The evidence shows that county-level voting patterns for state-chartered banks were...

Deterioration in the link between M2 and GDP, along with large prediction errors, led the Federal Reserve to downgrade M2 as a reliable indicator in 1993. We argue that the financial condition of depository institutions was a major factor behind this unusual pattern of M2 growth. When...

This study investigates the anomalous relationship between real stock returns and inflation. Specifically, we investigate hypotheses that claim the proxy relationship between inflation and expected real output is driven by the practice of debt monetization and/or countercyclical monetary policy...

While subordinated debt can be used to increase market discipline on banks by playing a corporate governance role in the presence of a federal safety net that encourages risk taking, it also has implications for banks’ loan sales. Using two measures of banks’ loan sales activity, we find...