Ecdat (version 0.4-2)

bankingCrises: Countries in Banking Crises

Description

A data.frame identifying which of 70 countries had a banking crisis each year 1800:2010. The first column is year. The remaining columns carry the names of the countries; those columns are 1 for years with banking crises and 0 otherwise.

Usage

data(bankingCrises)

Format

A data.frame

Author

Spencer Graves

Details

This file was created using the following command:

bankingCrises <- readFinancialCrisisFiles(FinancialCrisisFiles)

HOWEVER: This function was in Ecfun 0.2-3 but was removed in 0.2-4. It used gdata::read.xls, and gdata users were informed that gdata might be removed from CRAN, and any package that used it would also be removed. It seemed that the database that this function was designed to read may not have been updated, which suggested that it made sense to remove this function, because it there may not be any further need for it.

This dataset is an update of a subset of the data used to create Figure 10.1. Capital Mobility and the Incidence of Banking Crises, All Countries, 1800-2008, Reinhart and Rogoff (2009, p. 156).

The general upward trend visible in a plot of these data may be attributed to at least two different factors:

(1) The gradual increase in the proportion of human labor that is monetized.

(2) An increase in the general ability of cronies of those in power to gamble with other people's money in forming and bankrupting financial institutions. The marked feature of this plot is the virtual absence of banking crises during the period of the Bretton Woods agreement, 1944 to 1971. This period ended when US President Nixon in effect canceled the Bretton Woods agreement by taking the US off the silver standard.

References

Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (2009) This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton U. Pr.

Examples

data(bankingCrises)
numberOfCrises <- rowSums(bankingCrises[-1], na.rm=TRUE)
plot(bankingCrises$year, numberOfCrises, type='b')

# Write to a file for Wikimedia Commons
if (FALSE) {
if(FALSE){
  svg('bankingCrises.svg')
  plot(bankingCrises$year, numberOfCrises, type='b', 
    cex.axis=2, las=1, xlab='', ylab='', bty='n', cex=0.5)
  abline(v=c(1945, 1971), lty='dashed', col='blue')
  text(1958, 14, 'Bretton Woods', srt=90, cex=2, col='blue')
  dev.off()
  }
  }