How have the politics of banking crises changed over the long run? Unlike existing static accounts, we offer a dynamic theory emphasizing how the emergence of voters’ “great expectations” after the 1930s concerning crisis prevention and mitigation reshaped the politics of banking crises in...

This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...