Financial crises, like disease outbreaks, are recurring events with devastating consequences.  Contagious and difficult to control, crises trigger steep declines in asset prices, disrupt credit intermediation, and precipitate waves of business failures, unemployment, and other economic dislocations. The experience of living through a crisis can have lasting impacts, even shaping individuals’ beliefs and preferences decades later. Crises can also have significant political repercussions. For example, the Great Depression contributed to the rise of fascism in Europe, and to an unprecedented reconfiguration of American institutions—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the incipient financial panic at the outset of the Covid pandemic remind us that financial crises are likely to recur, and that understanding financial crises remains as important as ever. In recent years scholars have assembled new sources of data and utilized novel empirical designs to analyze financial crises, shedding light on old questions and producing new insights.  In what follows, I highlight some of those insights, as discussed in Hilt (2026). (more…)