Abstract

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.

中文翻译：

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没有恐慌的银行危机*

摘要

我们通过银行资产净值下降的角度考察历史性银行危机，涵盖了有或没有银行恐慌的大量银行困境事件。为此，我们构建了一个有关1870年至2016年期间46个国家/地区的银行股权收益和银行恐慌叙事信息的新数据集。我们发现，即使在没有恐慌的情况下，大量银行股票下跌也与大量信贷相关联收缩和产出缺口。尽管恐慌是重要的放大机制，但我们的结果表明，恐慌对于银行危机产生严重的经济后果不是必需的。此外，在恐慌之前往往会出现大量银行资产减少的情况，这表明恐慌是银行较早亏损的结果，而不是原因。