Financial regulation and financial sector instability

The financial the history of the United States is replete with crises. Between 1870 and 1910, the United States witnessed five major banking crises. The Great Depression witnessed a near financial collapse with a third of the nation's banks failing. While the United States has not experienced a banking panic since the Depression, financial crises in the developing world have become a topic of increasing concern. This dissertation investigates past and contemporary financial crises to determine their causes, the ways they spread, and whether government policy can prevent or promote financial instability.; In Chapter 1, I test the widely held belief that legal restrictions on branch banking aggravated the problem of financial instability in the United States during the Great Depression by examining the survival of individual branch and unit banks. The results indicate that instead of being more likely to survive, branch banks were more likely to fail. Further investigation suggests that this higher failure rate occurred because branch banks systematically held riskier portfolios than unit banks.; Chapter 2 investigates why the Panic of 1893 spanned the United States. Some argue that the crisis spread through the reserve structure of the banking system, while others claim that it was widespread due to a nationwide real economic shock. Using both state and individual bank level data, I investigate these hypothesize. I find some evidence that real shocks were important and no evidence that the reserve structure acted to transmit the crisis.; In Chapter 3, Leonardo Hernandez and I study whether developing countries can influence the composition of the capital inflows that they receive and whether the composition of inflows in turn affects the susceptibility of countries to crises. Results indicate that countries can adopt policies that influence the relative shares of direct investment, short-term debt, and portfolio equity in their capital inflows. We further find that the composition of inflows affects the susceptibility of countries to crisis. The currency composition of debt was important during the Asian crisis and the amount of outstanding short-term debt that countries held may have played a role in the Mexican crisis.