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Discussion Paper
How (Un-)Informed Are Depositors in a Banking Panic? A Lesson from History
Blickle, Kristian S.; Brunnermeier, Markus K.; Luck, Stephan (2022-02-17)
How informed or uninformed are bank depositors in a banking crisis? Can depositors anticipate which banks will fail? Understanding the behavior of depositors in financial crises is key to evaluating the policy measures, such as deposit insurance, designed to prevent them. But this is difficult in modern settings. The fact that bank runs are rare and deposit insurance universal implies that it is rare to be able to observe how depositors would behave in absence of the policy. Hence, as empiricists, we are lacking the counterfactual of depositor behavior during a run that is undistorted by the ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220217

Working Paper
Too-Big-to-Fail before the Fed
Gorton, Gary; Tallman, Ellis W. (2016-05-06)
?Too-big-to-fail? is consistent with policies followed by private bank clearing houses during financial crises in the U.S. National Banking Era prior to the existence of the Federal Reserve System. Private bank clearing houses provided emergency lending to member banks during financial crises. This behavior strongly suggests that ?too-big-to-fail? is not the problem causing modern crises. Rather, it is a reasonable response to the threat posed to large banks by the vulnerability of short-term debt to runs.
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1612

Discussion Paper
Why Do Banks Fail? The Predictability of Bank Failures
Correia, Sergio A.; Luck, Stephan; Verner, Emil (2024-11-22)
Can bank failures be predicted before they happen? In a previous post, we established three facts about failing banks that indicated that failing banks experience deteriorating fundamentals many years ahead of their failure and across a broad range of institutional settings. In this post, we document that bank failures are remarkably predictable based on simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements that measure a bank’s insolvency risk and funding vulnerabilities.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20241122

Working Paper
Shadow Bank Runs
Andolfatto, David; Nosal, Ed (2020-08-21)
Short-term debt is commonly used to fund illiquid assets. A conventional view asserts that such arrangements are run-prone in part because redemptions must be processed on a first-come, first-served basis. This sequential service protocol, however, appears absent in the wholesale banking sector—and yet, shadow banks appear vulnerable to runs. We explain how banking arrangements that fund fixed-cost operations using short-term debt can be run-prone even in the absence of sequential service. Interventions designed to eliminate run risk may or may not improve depositor welfare. We describe how ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2020-14

Discussion Paper
Using AI to Let History Speak About Bank Runs
Correia, Sergio A.; Luck, Stephan; Verner, Emil (2026-07-07)
Banking crises are commonly associated with bank runs and banking panics, yet our empirical understanding of bank runs is constrained by a lack of bank-level data. In a new paper, we use large language models (LLMs) to extract information on bank runs from millions of digitized historical newspaper pages, creating the most comprehensive database of bank runs in U.S. history. Every bank run episode that we identify is documented on a companion website where users can browse and examine individual episodes, and read the original newspaper articles. In this post, we describe how we built this ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20260707a

Speech
Modern recipes for financial crises
McAndrews, James J. (2015-12-04)
Remarks at the University of Iowa, December 4, 2015.
Speech , Paper 190

Working Paper
The Fragility of Perfectly Safe Digital Money
Klee, Elizabeth C.; Lubis, Arazi; Ross, Chase; Ross, Sharon Y.; Vardoulakis, Alexandros (2026-06-02)
Digital money differs from previous forms of money in an important way: it unbundles trust. Instead of relying on a trustworthy institution to settle payments, it relies on decentralized verification, whose cost is priced separately through congestion-sensitive gas fees. This arrangement creates a novel fragility from the interaction of two opposing forces: network externalities, which make digital money more valuable as adoption rises, and congestion fees, which make it more costly to use. We show that these forces generate strategic complementarities in redemption decisions and can create ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2026-037

Working Paper
Shadow Bank Runs
Andolfatto, David; Nosal, Ed (2020-06-08)
Short-term debt is commonly used to fund illiquid assets. A conventional view asserts that such arrangements are run-prone in part because redemptions must be processed on a first-come, first-served basis. This sequential service protocol, however, appears absent in the wholesale banking sector---and yet, shadow banks appear vulnerable to runs. We explain how banking arrangements that fund fixed-cost operations using short-term debt can be run-prone even in the absence of sequential service. Interventions designed to eliminate run risk may or may not improve depositor welfare. We describe how ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-012

Working Paper
The Effect of Safe Assets on Financial Fragility in a Bank-Run Model
Elamin, Mahmoud; Ahnert, Toni (2014-12-22)
Risk-averse investors induce competitive intermediaries to hold safe assets, thereby lowering the probability of a run and reducing financial fragility. We revisit Goldstein and Pauzner (2005), who obtain a unique equilibrium in the banking model of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) by introducing risky investment and noisy private signals. We show that, in the optimal demand-deposit contract subject to sequential service, banks hold safe assets to insure investors against investment risk. Consequently, fewer investors withdraw prematurely, which reduces the probability of a bank run. Safe asset ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1437

Working Paper
How Did Pre-Fed Banking Panics End?
Gorton, Gary; Tallman, Ellis W. (2016-01-14)
How did pre-Fed banking crises end? How did depositors? beliefs change? During the National Banking Era, 1863-1914, banks responded to the severe panics by suspending convertibility; that is, they refused to exchange cash for their liabilities (checking accounts). At the start of the suspension period, the private clearing houses cut off bank-specific information. Member banks were legally united into a single entity by the issuance of emergency loan certificates, a joint liability. A new market for certified checks opened, pricing the risk of clearing house failure. Certified checks traded ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1603

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