The trend deviation of the Credit-to-GDP ratio (“Basel gap”) is a widely used early warning indicator of banking crises. It is calculated with the one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter using an extremely large value of the smoothing parameter λ. We recalibrate the smoothing parameter with panel...

A survey of the empirical literature on early warning indicators of banking crises is presented. Descriptive analyses have been published for decades, but cross-national panel data analyses have only been performed since the late 1990s. More recently, the severity of the subprime-Lehman crisis...