IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedhwp/wp-2011-15.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The cost of banking panics in an age before “Too Big to Fail”

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin Chabot

Abstract

How costly were the banking panics of the National Banking Era (1861-1913)? I combine two hand-collected data sets - the weekly statements of the New York Clearing House banks and the monthly holding period return of every stock listed on the NYSE - to estimate the cost of banking panics in an era before ?too big to fail.? The bank statements allow me to construct a hypothetical insurance contract which would have allowed investors to insure against sudden deposit withdrawals and the cross-section of stock returns allow us to draw inferences about the marginal utility during panic states. Panics were costly. The cross-section of gilded-age stock returns imply investors would have willingly paid a 14% annual premium above actuarial fair value to insure $100 against unexpected deposit withdrawals The implied consumption of stock investors suggests that the consumption loss associated with National Banking Era bank runs was far more costly than the consumption loss from stock market crashes.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin Chabot, 2011. "The cost of banking panics in an age before “Too Big to Fail”," Working Paper Series WP-2011-15, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedhwp:wp-2011-15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/working_papers/2011/wp2011_15.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Miron, Jeffrey A, 1986. "Financial Panics, the Seasonality of the Nominal Interest Rate, and theFounding of the Fed," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(1), pages 125-140, March.
    2. Douglas W. Diamond & Raghuram G. Rajan, 2006. "Money in a Theory of Banking," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 30-53, March.
    3. Douglas W. Diamond & Philip H. Dybvig, 2000. "Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, vol. 24(Win), pages 14-23.
    4. Charles W. Calomiris & Gary Gorton, 1991. "The Origins of Banking Panics: Models, Facts, and Bank Regulation," NBER Chapters, in: Financial Markets and Financial Crises, pages 109-174, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Gorton, Gary, 1988. "Banking Panics and Business Cycles," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 40(4), pages 751-781, December.
    6. Sandro Brusco & Fabio Castiglionesi, 2007. "Liquidity Coinsurance, Moral Hazard, and Financial Contagion," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 62(5), pages 2275-2302, October.
    7. Hansen, Lars Peter & Jagannathan, Ravi, 1997. "Assessing Specification Errors in Stochastic Discount Factor Models," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(2), pages 557-590, June.
    8. Allen, Franklin & Gale, Douglas, 1997. "Financial Markets, Intermediaries, and Intertemporal Smoothing," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(3), pages 523-546, June.
    9. repec:bla:jfinan:v:43:y:1988:i:3:p:749-61 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Hansen, Lars Peter & Jagannathan, Ravi, 1991. "Implications of Security Market Data for Models of Dynamic Economies," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 99(2), pages 225-262, April.
    11. Douglas W. Diamond & Raghuram G. Rajan, 2001. "Liquidity Risk, Liquidity Creation, and Financial Fragility: A Theory of Banking," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(2), pages 287-327, April.
    12. R. Glenn Hubbard, 1991. "Financial Markets and Financial Crises," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number glen91-1.
    13. Bryant, John, 1980. "A model of reserves, bank runs, and deposit insurance," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 4(4), pages 335-344, December.
    14. Wicker,Elmus, 2000. "Banking Panics of the Gilded Age," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521770231, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Qian Chen & Christoffer Koch & Padma Sharma & Gary Richardson, 2020. "Payments Crises and Consequences," NBER Working Papers 27733, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Benjamin Chabot & Gabe Herman, 2013. "A History of Large-Scale Asset Purchases before the Federal Reserve," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, issue Q IV, pages 140-152.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Committee, Nobel Prize, 2022. "Financial Intermediation and the Economy," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 2022-2, Nobel Prize Committee.
    2. Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham & Tanju Yorulmazer, 2010. "Liquidity, Bank Runs, and Bailouts: Spillover Effects During the Northern Rock Episode," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 37(2), pages 83-98, June.
    3. Hoag, Christopher, 2005. "Deposit drains on "interest-paying" banks before financial crises," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 42(4), pages 567-585, October.
    4. Douglas W. Diamond & Raghuram G. Rajan, 2005. "Liquidity Shortages and Banking Crises," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(2), pages 615-647, April.
    5. Assaf Razin & Itay Goldstein, 2012. "Review Of Theories of Financial Crises," 2012 Meeting Papers 214, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    6. Goldstein, Itay & Razin, Assaf, 2015. "Three Branches of Theories of Financial Crises," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 10(2), pages 113-180, 30.
    7. Fungáčová, Zuzana & Turk-Ariss, Rima & Weill, Laurent, 2013. "Does excessive liquidity creation trigger bank failures?," BOFIT Discussion Papers 2/2013, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition.
    8. repec:zbw:bofitp:2013_002 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Fungacova, Zuzana & Turk, Rima & Weill, Laurent, 2021. "High liquidity creation and bank failures," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 57(C).
    10. Michiel Bijlsma & Wouter Elsenburg & Michiel van Leuvensteijn, 2010. "Four Futures for Finance; A scenario study," CPB Document 211.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    11. Gorton, Gary & Huang, Lixin, 2006. "Bank panics and the endogeneity of central banking," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(7), pages 1613-1629, October.
    12. Davison, Lee K. & Ramirez, Carlos D., 2014. "Local banking panics of the 1920s: Identification and determinants," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 164-177.
    13. Carlson, Mark, 2005. "Causes of bank suspensions in the panic of 1893," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 56-80, January.
    14. Dwyer Jr., Gerald P. & Samartín, Margarita, 2009. "Why do banks promise to pay par on demand?," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 147-169, June.
    15. Gorton, Gary & Winton, Andrew, 2003. "Financial intermediation," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 8, pages 431-552, Elsevier.
    16. Goetz von Peter, 2003. "A Unified Approach to Credit Crunches, Financial Instability, and Banking Crises," Macroeconomics 0312006, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    17. Silva, Walmir & Kimura, Herbert & Sobreiro, Vinicius Amorim, 2017. "An analysis of the literature on systemic financial risk: A survey," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 91-114.
    18. Franklin Allen & Douglas Gale, 2003. "Financial Fragility, Liquidity and Asset Prices," Center for Financial Institutions Working Papers 01-37, Wharton School Center for Financial Institutions, University of Pennsylvania.
    19. Michele Fratianni, 2008. "Financial Crises, Safety Nets and Regulation," Rivista italiana degli economisti, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 2, pages 169-208.
    20. Rajkamal Iyer & José-Luis Peydró, 2011. "Interbank Contagion at Work: Evidence from a Natural Experiment," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(4), pages 1337-1377.
    21. Gu, Chao, 2007. "Asymmetric Information and Bank Runs," Working Papers 07-14, Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    National Bank Act; Financial crises;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedhwp:wp-2011-15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lauren Wiese (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbchus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.