In episodes of significant banking distress or perceived systemic risk to the financial system, policymakers have often opted for issuing blanket guarantees on bank liabilities to stop or avoid widespread bank runs. In theory, blanket guarantees can prevent bank runs if they are credible....

This paper presents a new database of systemic banking crises for the period 1970-2009. While there are many commonalities between recent and past crises, both in terms of underlying causes and policy responses, there are some important differences in terms of the scale and scope of...

The appropriate level of bank capital and, more generally, a bank's capacity to absorb losses, has been at the core of the post-crisis policy debate. This paper contributes to the debate by focusing on how much capital would have been needed to avoid imposing losses on bank creditors or...

This paper updates the database on systemic banking crises presented in Laeven and Valencia (2008, 2013). Drawing on 151 systemic banking crises episodes around the globe during 1970-2017, the database includes information on crisis dates, policy responses to resolve banking crises, and the...