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.

Citation

Calomiris, Charles, and Joseph Mason. "Fundamentals, Panics, and Bank Distress During the Depression." In Financial Crises. Ed. Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2008.

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