Historical Banking Crises: A New Database and a Reassessment of their Incidence and Severity

Abstract

We highlight limitations with existing chronologies of banking crises and showcase new approaches for reconstructing and analyzing the global history of banking crises. We review recent quantitative approaches to ask: When did banking crises happen and how severe were they? Building on the chronology of banking crises put forth by Baron, Verner, and Xiong (2021), we present a new database of the causes, timeline, bank failures, creditor panics, policy responses, and consequences of banking crises in 47 countries since 1870.

Keywords: historical banking crises

JEL Classification: G01