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.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in its series Working Paper with number
96-3.
Cited by: (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.)