Professor Eugene White awarded NSF grant

Economic historian Eugene White has been awarded a three year $289,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. As the recent banking crisis in the United States has reminded us, effective bank supervision is an important instrument for avoiding crises and promoting financial stability.  Professor's White's project, "The Evolution of Bank Supervision in the United States: 1863-2008," will produce the first comprehensive history of U.S. bank supervision. While there was a large, complex supervisory network in place, the agencies failed to detect and prevent excessive risk-taking and even illegal activities.  Reforming the bank supervisory structure requires a thorough understanding of the development and issues underlying the system of supervision. By providing a comprehensive statistical study of bank supervision in the United States, this project will yield some of the necessary information and should inform subsequent theoretical and empirical economic analyses that will be needed for reform.