Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914

Michael Bordo, Peter Rappoport and Anna Schwartz

No 3689, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In this paper we examine the evidence for two competing views of how monetary and financial disturbances influenced the real economy during the national banking era, 1880-1914. According to the monetarist view, monetary disturbances affected the real economy through changes on the liability side of the banking system's balance sheet independent of the composition of bank portfolios. According to the credit rationing view, equilibrium credit rationing in a world of asymmetric information can explain short-run fluctuations in real output. Using structural VARs we incorporate monetary variables in credit models and credit variables in monetarist models, with inconclusive results. To resolve this ambiguity, we invoke the institutional features of the national banking era. Most of the variation in bank loans is accounted for by loans secured by stock, which in turn reflect volatility in the stock market. When account is taken of the stock market, the influence of credit in the VAR model is greatly reduced, while the influence of money remains robust. The breakdown of the composition of bank loans into stock market loans (traded in open asset markets) and other business loans (a possible setting for credit rationing) reveals that other business loans remained remarkably stable over the business cycle.

Date: 1991-04
Note: ME DAE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History, edited by Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff, pp. 189-223. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Published as Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914 , Michael D. Bordo, Peter Rappoport, Anna J. Schwartz. in Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel , Goldin and Rockoff. 1992

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3689.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914 (1992)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3689

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3689

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().