It has been argued that credit-to-GDP gaps (credit gap) are useful early warning indicators for banking crises. In addition, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has also advocated using these gaps - estimated using a one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter with a smoothing parameter of 400,000...

Despite their importance, data capturing total credit to the private non-financial sector are scarce. This article introduces a new BIS database that provides this information for 40 economies with, on average, more than 45 years of quarterly data, reaching back to the 1940s and 1950s in some...