In 1936-37, the Federal Reserve doubled member banks' reserve requirements. Friedman and Schwartz (1963) famously argued that the doubling increased reserve demand and forced the money supply to contract, which they argued caused the recession of 1937-38. Using a new database on individual...

The failure of Lehman Brothers highlighted the severe lapses in risk management and regulatory oversight that brought on and intensified the global financial crisis. This paper presents a structural credit risk model that provides useful early warning signals that regulators could have used to...