This paper contributes to the literature on moral hazard, lending of last resort and the political origins of banking crises. Drawing on newly accessed quantitative and qualitative archival sources the paper documents how a bank-Banco de Cataluña-formed a coalition with the Dictatorship of...

We use the German Crisis of 1931, a key event of the Great Depression, to study how depositors behave during a bank run in the absence of deposit insurance. We find that deposits decline by around 20 percent during the run and that there is an equal outflow of retail and nonfinancial wholesale...

This paper studies a major financial panic, the run on the German banking system in 1931, to distinguish between banking theories that view depositors as demanders of liquidity and those that view them as providers of discipline. Our empirical approach exploits the fact that the German Crisis of...

In this article, I review the role of the IMF in the global crisis and argue that the Fund has emerged as a powerful institutional force, providing analysis and recommendations that have served as the basis of official action on several fronts. By contrast, the Fund was barking up the wrong tree...

Rethinking Regulation of International Finance encapsulates the most important aspects of the development and operation of the international financial system. This book questions the fundamental basis of the existing international financial architecture (soft law) and explores the need for a...

This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are...

Studies on social behaviour, habitus, values and norms of bankers are a desideratum of research. Therefore, it is only justifiable with reservations to define the banker more closely as a social type. This contribution attempts to answer the question of the extent to which German bankers behaved...

This paper discusses the instrument of equalisation claims, which has successfully been used in two previous German debt crises as a method for stabilizing the balance sheets of financial institutions. A modern version of this method would swap temporarily illiquid assets for government bonds...

Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This article answers this question by analysing the effect of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s on 142 banks, of which 33 failed. We find that choices of balance sheet composition and product market strategy made in the...

The paper puts the outcome during the most recent financial crisis in a historical perspective by taking a closer look at the frequency of extreme events in the economic history of Denmark, in some cases based on time series back to the late 1600s. We focus on the frequency distribution of a...