New Perspectives on Interwar Financial and Banking Crises
The recent global financial crisis has sparked renewed interest in the interwar financial and banking crises, particularly those associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s. This new wave of research has been supported by an unprecedented increase in the digitisation of monetary and financial statistics as well as data on local economic activity and businesses. The digitisation of newspapers, central bank and parliamentary reports in several countries improves access to archival sources, opening new perspectives on the political economy of these crises.
Remarkable progress has been made in our understanding of domestic or international financial contagion (through interbank networks), as well as the real effects of banking crises. However, this new wave of research has remained little comparative, and most of the work has focused on the contagion and consequences of the 1930-1931 banking troubles.
The first objective of this conference is to be truly comparative by bringing together researchers working on numerous different countries. The second is to extend the scope of the analysis by considering the entire period between the two world wars. We are very interested in articles that attempt to explain the financial vulnerabilities of the early 1930s by examining the accumulation of risk (and the first financial crises) that started in the aftermath of the First World War. Third, the conference aims to examine the entire financial system, investigating the relationships between stock markets, banks and non-bank financial institutions (including public financial entities). Fourth, we also welcome papers that study how financial and banking systems were fixed in countries exiting crises.