Flight-to-safety and the credit crunch: A new history of the banking crisis in France during the Great Depression
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29 novembre 2018
- handle: 10670/1.w2f2tr
- hal: hal-04147416
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Frenchmen (French people) Banking Banking industry Commercial banks Agricultural banks Depository institutionsCiter ce document
Stefano Ungaro et al., « Flight-to-safety and the credit crunch: A new history of the banking crisis in France during the Great Depression », HAL-SHS : histoire, ID : 10670/1.w2f2tr
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Previous research has downplayed the role of banking panics and financial factors in the French Great Depression. This column uses a newly assembled dataset of balance sheets for more than 400 French banks from the interwar period to challenge this long-held idea. The empirical results show two dramatic waves of panic in 1930 and 1931, and point to a flight-to-safety mechanism. The findings illustrate how minor macroeconomic assumptions and extrapolations on monetary statistics can introduce large, persistent biases in historiography.