This dissertation will address three significant topics in money, banking, and finance. The first chapter contributes to the current debate over is Gresham's Law. This “law” had long been considered a basic principle of monetary economics, yet over the last few decades it has become commonly criticized as a failure. I clarify the theory of Gresham's Law as a description of price controls on the exchange of currencies and provide historical evidence of the influence of Gresham's Law on English coinage from 1344 to 1815.

The second chapter presents a generalized version of the Diamond-Dybvig model. The recent literature on bank runs, following Diamond and Dybvig (1983), studies the banking sector in isolation from the greater economy. Here I model an economy that includes not only DD type bank depositors but also producers of goods. When consumers can exchange goods for deposits, trade provides a welfare improvement, and bank runs are not an equilibrium unless the bank is fundamentally insolvent.

The final chapter examines the influences of capital and risk-based capital (RBC) on the stock prices and bond yield spreads of US bank holding companies from 2000 to 2010. Both capital and RBC are significantly related to these risk indicators in several quarters. However, there does not appear to be a significant difference between the influences of capital and RBC in any quarter, indicating that RBC does not improve upon the standard capital ratio.