Failing Banks
Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1863 through 2024 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive noncore funding. These commonalities imply that bank failures are highly predictable using simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements. Failures with runs were common before deposit insurance, but these failures are strongly related to weak fundamentals, casting doubt on the importance of non-fundamental runs. Furthermore, low recovery rates on failed banks’ assets suggest that most failed banks were fundamentally insolvent, barring strong assumptions about the value destruction of receiverships. Altogether, our evidence suggests that the primary cause of bank failures and banking crises is almost always and everywhere a deterioration of bank fundamentals.
-
-
Copy CitationSergio A. Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner, "Failing Banks," NBER Working Paper 32907 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3386/w32907.Download Citation
-
Published Versions
Sergio Correia & Stephan Luck & Emil Verner, 2026. "Failing Banks," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 141(1), pages 147-204.
Related
More from the NBER
In addition to working papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter, the NBER Digest, the Bulletin on Health, and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship — as well as online conference reports, video lectures, and interviews.
