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Suspension of payments, bank failures, and the nonbank public's losses

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Author Info
Gerald P. Dwyer, Jr.
Iftekhar Hasan

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Abstract

Arguably, eliminating suspensions of payments--periods when banks jointly refuse to convert their liabilities into outside money or other assets--was an important impetus for creating the Federal Reserve. Friedman and Schwartz suggest that a suspension in 1930 would have decreased the severity of the Great Depression. More recently, an emerging literature suggests that suspensions of payments may well be optimal in some states of the world. We present evidence about suspensions of payments from an episode that is close to a controlled experiment for examining their effects. In 1861, about 44 percent of the banks in Wisconsin closed, 81 percent of the banks in Illinois closed, and noteholders suffered substantial losses. The historical record suggests a possible explanation: an effective suspension of payments in Wisconsin but not Illinois. Historical and statistical evidence indicate that the suspension of payments decreased the number of banks that closed as well as noteholders' losses. Our statistical evidence indicates a 25 percent increase in the probability that an average bank in the two states remains open with the suspension of payments. The suspension of payments decreases noteholders' losses by about 20 cents per dollar of notes.

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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in its series Working Paper with number 96-3.

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Date of creation: 1996
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Handle: RePEc:fip:fedawp:96-3

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Related research
Keywords: Bank failures Banks and banking - History Banks and banking Central

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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
  1. Gerald P. Dwyer, Jr. & R.W. Hafer, 2001. "Bank failures in banking panics: Risky banks or road kill?," Working Paper 2001-13, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. [Downloadable!]
  2. Miguel A. Kiguel & Alain Ize & Eduardo Levy Yeyati, 2005. "Managing Systemic Liquidity Risk in Financially Dollarized Economies," IMF Working Papers 05/188, International Monetary Fund. [Downloadable!]
  3. Alain Ize & Miguel Kiguel & Eduardo Levy Yeyati, 2005. "Managing Systemic Liquidity Risk in Financially Dollarized Economy," Business School Working Papers managsystrisk, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. [Downloadable!]
  4. Gerald P. Dwyer, Jr. & Margarita Samartín, 2006. "Why do banks promise to pay par on demand?," Working Paper 2006-26, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. [Downloadable!]
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