Financial crises have been a common feature of the economic landscape for more than two centuries. The chapter defines banking crises, considers the type of costs that they impose, and outlines the most common causes of banking crises during the past 200 years. The remainder of the chapter...

We employ a unique hand-collected dataset and a novel methodology to examine systemic risk before and after the largest U.S. banking crisis of the 20th century. Our systemic risk measure captures both the credit risk of an individual bank as well as a bank's position in the network. We construct...

This paper studies banks' liquidity provision in the Lagos and Wright model of monetary exchanges. With aggregate uncertainty we show that banks sometimes exhaust their cash reserves and fail to satisfy their depositors' need of consumption smoothing. The banking panics can be eliminated by the...

Empirical evidence that migrants send home more remittances after disasters raises the question of whether remittances can be used to self-insure, substituting for both formal and informal insurance. We investigate this question using a unique data set on the usage patterns of financial services...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks'...

Banking across borders has risen substantially over the past two decades. Yet there is significant heterogeneity in the international and global activities of banks across countries. This paper develops and tests a theoretical model that explains this variation from an international trade theory...

The number of firm bankruptcies is surprisingly low in economies with poor institutions. We study a model of bank-firm relationship and show that the banks̕ decision to liquidate bad firms has two opposing effects. First, the bank receives a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it loses the...

When firms borrow in foreign currency but collect revenues in local currency, exchange rate changes can affect their ability to repay their debt. Using loan-level data from U.S. banks' regulatory filings, this paper studies the effect of exchange rate changes on firms’ loan payments. A 10...