Determinants of financial crises—An early warning system based on panel logit regression

Despite the fact that different types of financial crises are rooted in similar weaknesses of economy or may have common determinants, the very transmission mechanism may determine one category as leading or lagging behind others. We are focused on financial crises that necessarily have the features of systemic banking crises and assess econometric early warning system of 64 systemic banking crises that occurred in the period from 1977 to 2013. The paper employs two different procedures, based on panel logit regression. The dynamic discrete‐choice (binary) early warning model clearly outperformed the static model. The set of significant explanatory variables changed relative to the findings of the static model. The most significant predictor of the crises in the better performing model is deposit insurance system, followed by international reserves, M2‐to‐international reserves ratio, M2 multiplier, bank deposits, and bank reserves ratio. The statistical significance of the lagged variable confirmed the necessity to take the effect of crisis persistence into account.