Banking and currency crises have done severe economic damage in many countries in recent years. This article examines the causes and characteristics of these crises and the public policies intended to prevent them or mitigate their adverse consequences.

This paper presents a new database on the timing of systemic banking crises and policy responses to resolve them. The database covers the universe of systemic banking crises for the period 1970-2007, with detailed data on crisis containment and resolution policies for 42 crisis episodes, and...

The failure of the Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corporation (RISDIC), a private insurance fund, and the closure of its 45 remaining member institutions froze the accounts of 300,000 individuals and 10 percent of all deposits in the state. While the closure of two institutions...

This paper develops a simple model of an international lender of last resort (ILOLR). The world economy consists of many open economies, each with a banking system and a central bank operating under a pegged exchange rate regime. The fragility of the banking system and the limited ability of a...

The coincidence of banking and currency crises associated with the Asian financial crisis has drawn renewed attention to causal and common factors linking the two phenomena. In this paper, we analyze the incidence and underlying causes of banking and currency crises in 90 industrial and...

Bank panics were a regular occurrence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The failure of one commodity speculator in October 1907 triggered a nationwide bank run. This publication tells how the panic developed, spread, and was resolved. A chronology is included along with a section of...

The need for federal deposit insurance is often based on the claim that it prevents bank runs and makes the banking system more stable. But research shows that banks could prevent bank runs by constructing their deposit contracts appropriately, and, in the absence of deposit insurance, they...

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...