Private money and money market integration: The role of payments infrastructure in nineteenth‐century Switzerland

Abstract

Using newly collected discount rate data for six Swiss cities from 1846 to 1893, we find no evidence of increasing integration during a 30‐year period of lightly regulated free banking. We attribute this to two structural issues: banks had incentives to ward off competitors by protecting their local monopolies or forming cartels, and there was always a risk (which varied across banks) that banknotes were not accepted or converted at par. We use a novel counterfactual to show that these issues increased discount rate dispersion, and argue that as a result, public regulation of payments infrastructure was necessary for money market integration.