This Time Is the Same: Using Bank Performance in 1998 to Explain Bank Performance During the Recent Financial Crisis
We investigate whether a bank's performance during the 1998 crisis, which was viewed at the time as the most dramatic crisis since the Great Depression, predicts its performance during the recent financial crisis. One hypothesis is that a bank that has an especially poor experience in a crisis learns and adapts, so that it performs better in the next crisis. Another hypothesis is that a bank's poor experience in a crisis is tied to aspects of its business model that are persistent, so that its past performance during one crisis forecasts poor performance during another crisis. We show that banks that performed worse during the 1998 crisis did so as well during the recent financial crisis. This effect is economically important. In particular, it is economically as important as the leverage of banks before the start of the crisis. The result cannot be attributed to banks having the same chief executive in both crises. Banks that relied more on short-term funding, had more leverage, and grew more are more likely to be banks that performed poorly in both crises.
Non-Technical Summaries
- The stock market performance of a bank in the recent crisis is positively correlated with the performance of that same bank in the 1998...
Published Versions
Rüdiger Fahlenbrach & Robert Prilmeier & René M. Stulz, 2012. "This Time Is the Same: Using Bank Performance in 1998 to Explain Bank Performance during the Recent Financial Crisis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(6), pages 2139-2185, December. citation courtesy of 
Related
Programs
More from NBER
In addition to working papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter, the NBER Digest, the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability, the Bulletin on Health, and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship — as well as online conference reports, video lectures, and interviews.
