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Banks and Economic Growth

Do banks cause economic growth or are they a result of economic growth? The multitude of banking experiments in U.S. banking history make it a suitable laboratory to test conjectures about the relationship between growth and banking development. Matthew Jaremski and Peter Rousseau in "Banks, Free Banks, and U.S. Economic Growth" look at this relationship in the era prior to the Civil War, and they find that the free banking system had little effect on economic growth. Click here to read Chris Colvin's NEP-HIS review of this paper.
 
 
 
 

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