How far did antebellum bank notes travel? Up to now, we did not know. Using previously overlooked data on interbank holdings of bank notes and the records of a small-time note broker, I find that most bank notes circulated within about 50 miles of the issuing banks. Few notes were observed from...

Early American firms were shaped by contemporary social conceptions of appropriate horizontal power relations inside the firm and the Federalist era bank was shaped by these conceptions. The Federalist era debate on the corporation was much broader than how shareholders would treat with one...

Few pieces of economic regulation are ubiquitous as usury limits. Similarly, few economic principles are as widely accepted as the belief that interference with freely contracted prices leads to market distortions, and many studies of financial markets find that usury limits negatively affect...

Previous studies of entry under New York's free banking law of 1838 have generated conflicting results. This article shows that different measures of entry lead to different conclusions about the competitive effects of the law. Measured by the entry of new banks, New York's free banking law led...

Limited liability is a defining feature of the modern corporation, but it was not always so. By the early 1850s about one-half of all states imposed double liability on bank shareholders. This paper shows that double liability was adopted as deposits increased relative to banknotes and in...

The old-age security hypothesis establishes that one important reason why parents have a large offspring is to ensure that they will receive financial support from them in old age. In this paper we use data on fertility and financial development in 19th century U.S. to indirectly test this...

Studies of corporate governance are concerned with two features of modern shareholding: diffuse ownership and the resulting separation of ownership and control, which potentially leads to managerial self-dealing; and, majority shareholding, which potentially mitigates some managerial...