We examine the relationship of banking crises with economic growth and recessions. Our data cover 21 economies from around the world, most from 1870 to 2009 with the rest starting in 1901 or earlier. The data include capital investment and human capital formation. We have two major findings....

The authors examine the relative importance of the growth of physical and human capital and the growth of total factor productivity (TFP) using newly organized data on 145 countries that span more than one hundred years for twenty-four of these countries. For all countries, only 3 percent of...