Existing work on early warning systems (EWS) for banking crises generally omits bank capital, bank liquidity and property prices, despite their relevance to the probability of crisis in the mind of bankers, policymakers and the public. One reason for this neglect is that most work on EWS to date...

Against the background of the acknowledged importance of off-balance-sheet exposures in the sub prime crisis, we seek to investigate whether this was a new phenomenon or common to earlier crises. Using a logit approach to predicting banking crises in 14 OECD countries we find a significant...

The financial crisis that started in August 2008 has reached a climax in the autumn of 2008 with a wave of bank nationalisations across North America and Europe. Although banking crises are not uncommon, this is the largest since 1929—33. This paper discusses the build-up to the crisis,...

Recently there has been growing interest in examining the potential short-term link between survey-based confidence indicators and real economic activity, notably for macroeconomic policy making. This paper builds on previous studies to establish whether there is a short-term predictive...

Given the magnitude of “global imbalances” in the run-up to the subprime crisis, we test for an impact of the current account balance on the probability of banking crises in OECD countries since 1980. This variable has been neglected in most early warning models to date, despite its...

There is growing interest in examining the short-term link between survey-based confidence indicators and real economic activity. This paper builds on previous studies to establish whether there is a short-term predictive relationship between measures of consumer confidence and actual...