"Fundamentals, Panics, and Bank Distress During the Depression"
Financial Crises
Editor(s): Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale
© Edward Elgar,
2008
Publication type: Chapter
Research Archive Topic: Business Economics and Public Policy, Corporate Finance
Abstract
We assemble bank-level and other data for Fed member banks to model determinants of bank failure. Fundamentals explain bank failure risk well. The first two Friedman-Schwartz crises are not associated with positive unexplained residual failure risk, or increased importance of bank illiquidity for forecasting failure. The third Friedman-Schwartz crisis is more ambiguous, but increased residual failure risk is small in the aggregate. The final crisis (early 1933) saw a large unexplained increase in bank failure risk. Local contagion and illiquidity may have played a role in pre-1933 bank failures, even though those effects were not large in their aggregate impact.
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