Failing Banks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Correia, Sergio, Luck, Stephan, Verner, Emil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915758264549376
author Correia, Sergio
Luck, Stephan
Verner, Emil
author_facet Correia, Sergio
Luck, Stephan
Verner, Emil
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06082
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Failing Banks
Correia, Sergio
Luck, Stephan
Verner, Emil
General Economics
Economics
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.
title Failing Banks
topic General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06082