Sovereign Defaults and Banking Crises

This research is aimed at contributing to the endogenization of default costs. Higher exposure of a banking system to sovereign bonds increases the likelihood of banking panics due to sovereign defaults. Following (Gertler, Kiyotaki, 2015), the research models the possibility of a banking crisis occurring after a sovereign default. While a higher exposure of a banking system is associated with potential losses, this mechanism creates a stronger commitment to honor the sovereign debt. A marginal increase in the sovereign debt raises the ex-post costs of default through a higher likelihood of a banking crisis, thus making a default option less desirable. This mechanism might increase investors’ confidence and resolve the coordination problem of self-fulfilling crises. In part, this may explain the findings of Bocola and Dovis (2019), who claim that non-fundamental risk played only a limited role during the European sovereign debt crisis. Furthermore, as opposed to the standard solution of the coordination problem — to issue debt of longer maturity — a government can resolve this problem by forcing its banking system to hold more sovereign bonds.

Banking Crises Without Panics*

We examine historical banking crises through the lens of bank equity declines, which cover a broad sample of episodes of banking distress with and without banking panics. To do this, we construct a new data set on bank equity returns and narrative information on banking panics for 46 countries over the period of 1870 to 2016. We find that even in the absence of panics, large bank equity declines are associated with substantial credit contractions and output gaps. Although panics are an important amplification mechanism, our results indicate that panics are not necessary for banking crises to have severe economic consequences. Furthermore, panics tend to be preceded by large bank equity declines, suggesting that panics are the result, rather than the cause, of earlier bank losses. We use bank equity returns to uncover a number of forgotten historical banking crises and create a banking crisis chronology that distinguishes between bank equity losses and panics.

Banking Panics as Endogenous Disasters and the Welfare Gains from Macroprudential Policy

We study the welfare effects of macroprudential policy in a macroeconomic model of banking instability. Banking panics are endogenous economic disasters caused by banks' excessive leverage during credit booms. The model matches the frequency and severity of banking panics and the statistical relationship between panics and credit booms. A simple countercyclical macroprudential rule can achieve non-negligible welfare gains. These gains rise substantially when the run probability increases during a credit boom and, ex post, if a run is actually avoided. In a model without panics in which financial crises are driven by fundamentals only, the gains are much more limited.

A Macroeconomic Model with Financial Panics

This article incorporates banks and banking panics within a conventional macroeconomic framework to analyse the dynamics of a financial crisis of the kind recently experienced. We are particularly interested in characterizing the sudden and discrete nature of banking panics as well as the circumstances that make an economy vulnerable to such panics in some instances but not in others. Having a conventional macroeconomic model allows us to study the channels by which the crisis affects real activity both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition to modelling the financial collapse, we also introduce a belief driven credit boom that increases the susceptibility of the economy to a disruptive banking panic.

“Bank-Wreckers, Defaulters, and Embezzlers”: America’s Popular Fear and Fascination with the Misappropriation of Bank Deposits during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

This article explores how “bank-wreckers, defaulters, and embezzlers” were popularly perceived during Gilded Age and Progressive Era America, and how they contributed to a broader concern over the safety of deposits and helped drive efforts to achieve greater financial security. Their actions, often described as “wrecking,” referred to instances in which a banking institution was damaged or destroyed due to the embezzlement or general misappropriation of depositor funds by bank officials or employees. Wrecking occurred inside and outside of the era’s major banking panics, and attracted popular and critical attention over this period, especially between the 1880s and the early 1910s. It is argued that this phenomenon resonated within the popular imagination, which was reflected, reinforced, and even instilled through the media, and that this helped sustain doubts on the reliability of the nation’s banks and bankers. This article shows how notions of class, character, and gender influenced how people thought about the problem: wrecking demonstrated that respectability could be illusory and that men of the era could be tempted to “get rich quick” through dubious means. Some of the major attempts to resolve the problem are also discussed to highlight how efforts to prevent wrecking relate to the period’s general push to bolster economic stability. Ultimately, the article shows how seemingly disparate events can aggregate into a larger problem, which can in turn motivate solutions and reforms.