Identifying Banking Crises* Matthew Baron, Emil Verner, and Wei Xiong** January 31, 2018 Abstract We identify historical banking crises in 46 countries over the period 1870 - 2016 using new historical data on bank equity returns. We argue bank equity crashes provide an objective, quantitative, and theoretically-motivated measure of banking crises. We validate our measure by showing that bank equity crashes line up well with other indicators of banking crises (e.g., panics, bank failures, government intervention). They also forecast long-run output gaps. Bank equity declines tend to pick up impending crises first before credit spread and nonfinancial equity measures. Nevertheless, crises gradually unfold in bank equity prices over one to three years, rather than in sudden Minsky moments. Our approach uncovers several newly-identified banking crises and removes spurious banking crises. Comparing our revised chronology to previous ones, the aftermath of banking crises appears more severe, especially when restricting to crises featuring large bank equity declines. * The authors would like to thank William Shao and Bryan Tam for their extraordinary research assistance. Isha Agarwal, Isaac Green, Md Azharul Islam, Jamil Rahman, Felipe Silva, and the librarians at the Harvard Business School Historical Collections also provided valuable assistance. The authors would also like to thank Mikael Juselius and seminar participants at Cornell University and the 2018 AEA meetings for their comments and feedback. We thank Mika Vaihekoski for sharing data. ** Contact information: Matthew Baron, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University,
[email protected]; Emil Verner, Princeton University,
[email protected]; Wei Xiong, Princeton University and NBER,
[email protected].