Banking Crises: Perspectives from The New Palgrave Dictionary

Why do banks collapse? Are financial systems more fragile in recent decades? Can policies to fix the banking system do more harm than good? What's the history of banking crises? With dozens of brief, non-technical articles by economists and other researchers, Banking Crises offers answers from diverse scholarly viewpoints.

Banking panics are nothing new: in rich countries and poor, the banking system has long had a troubling tendency to collapse. This volume collects some remarkable articles from The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, encompassing its eight printed volumes and online successor. The selected articles focus on banking crises, their history, the theories and laboratory experiments that have investigated their causes, and some policy recommendations that might make them less likely — or at least less destructive — in the future. With dozens of brief, non-technical articles by economists and other researchers, Banking Crises offers answers from diverse scholarly viewpoints.

A third of the articles included were commissioned in the wake of the global financial crisis, outside of the 2008 print edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. This collection makes an excellent choice for college courses on banking and finance, as well as for policymakers and anyone who wants a serious, approachable take on the fragility of finance.