Failing Banks

104 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2023 Last revised: 3 Apr 2024

See all articles by Sergio Correia

Sergio Correia

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Stephan Luck

Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Emil Verner

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management

Date Written: August 27, 2024

Abstract

Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1865 through 2023 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive non-core funding. Commonalities across failing banks imply that failures are highly predictable using simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements. Predictability is high even in the absence of deposit insurance, when depositor runs were common. Bank-level fundamentals also forecast aggregate waves of bank failures during systemic banking crises. Altogether, our evidence suggests that the ultimate cause of bank failures and banking crises is almost always and everywhere a deterioration of bank fundamentals. Bank runs can be rejected as a plausible cause of failure for most failures in the history of the U.S. and are most commonly a consequence of imminent failure. Depositors tend to be slow to react to an increased risk of bank failure, even in the absence of deposit insurance. 

Keywords: bank failures, financial crises

JEL Classification: G01, G21, N20, N24

Suggested Citation

Correia, Sergio and Luck, Stephan and Verner, Emil, Failing Banks (August 27, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4650834 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4650834

Sergio Correia

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ( email )

20th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20551
United States

Stephan Luck

Federal Reserve Bank of New York ( email )

33 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10045
United States

Emil Verner (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

77 Massachusetts Avenue
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
United States

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