Milton Friedman has a whole chapter on essentially this issue (though his POD is 1873) in
Money Mischief.
https://books.google.com/books?id=lDF_uNIWQ_oC&pg=PT65 His conclusion is that retaining bimetallism (which in effect would have meant a silver standard) would have been a good thing and would have reduced the deflation that occurred in OTL in the two decades before 1896:
"...If my estimates are anywhere near correct, a bimetallic standard—really a silver standard—would have produced a considerably steadier price level than did the gold standard that was adopted.
"In addition, a silver standard almost surely would have avoided what Anna Schwartz and I, in our
Monetary History, dubbed ‘the disturbed years from 1891 to 1897’ (Friedman and Schwartz 1963, p. 104)— years that encompassed the very sharp contraction of 1892 to 1894, a brief and mild recovery from 1894 to 1895, another contraction from 1895 to 1896, widespread bank failures plus a banking panic in 1893, and a run on U.S. gold reserves by foreigners fearful that silver agitation would force the United States off the gold standard. Confidence was restored and a departure from gold prevented by a private syndicate headed by J.P. Morgan and August Belmont, under contract to the U.S. Treasury. The allegedly onerous terms of the contract, arranged secretly through agents long identified in Populist literature as ‘the conspiracy of international bankers,’ became an issue in the campaign of 1896 (Friedman and Schwartz 1963, p. 112n.).
The effects would not have been limited to the United States, of course. I have not been able to make anything like as thorough an empirical study for the rest of the world as for the United States. However, in the course of preparing the U.S. estimates, it was necessary to estimate the effect on the price level in the gold-standard world, for which I used Britain as a proxy…. The estimated effect, though smaller than in the United States, is clearly substantial. The price level would have been consistently higher. The decline in the price level from 1875 to 1895 would have been cut from 0.8 percent a year to 0.5 percent; the subsequent rise would have been increased from 0.09 percent a year to 1.1 percent. Here, too, however, effects other than those encompassed in our simple calculation would clearly have been present. The changes in the United States would doubtless have produced echoes elsewhere. A healthier U.S. economy would have meant a healthier world economy. In addition, the consistently lower real price of gold would have reduced the incentive to produce gold. That might have 118 delayed the introduction of the cyanide process for extracting low-grade ore, which was responsible for the flood of gold that produced world-wide inflation after 1896. I have not allowed for any such effects.
"Whether or not a verdict of guilty would have been appropriate in a court of law for 'the crime of 1873,' that verdict is appropriate in the court of history. The omission of the fateful line had momentous consequences for the subsequent monetary history of the United States and, indeed, to some extent, of the world. The rhetoric was overheated, but the importance of the issue was not over-stated. The real issue was the monetary standard: gold and silver bimetallism, which in practice in the United States had meant alternating silver and gold standards. The act of 1873 cast the die for a gold standard, which explains its significance. Moreover, while the conventional view is Laughlin's, that "the act of 1873 was a piece of good fortune" ([1886] 1895, p. 93), my own view is that it was the opposite—a mistake that had highly adverse consequences.
"I hasten to add that this is a judgment about 1873, not 1896. By 1896 it was too late to undo the damage, for reasons discussed in chapter 5. Bryan was trying to close the barn door after the horse had been stolen..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=lDF_uNIWQ_oC&pg=PT90