Daniel Dieckelmann was a PhD candidate in Economics at the John F. Kennedy Institute from 2017 to 2021 and received his PhD in Economics in July 2021 from the School of Business & Economics of Freie Universität Berlin.

In his thesis "Learning from the Past to Predict the Future: Three Essays on Banking Crises" he investigated the causes and the prediction of banking crises from a historical perspective.

After his graduation, Daniel took up a position at the European Central Bank.

His personal website is: https://sites.google.com/view/daniel-dieckelmann.

 
Learning from the Past to Predict the Future: Three Essays on Banking Crises

Dissertation in Economics

Mentoring team:
First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Max Steinhardt, Freie Universität Berlin
Second supervisor: Prof. Matthew Baron, PhD, Cornell University
Prof. Dr. Moritz Schularick, University of Bonn
Priv.-Doz. Dr. Till Strohsal, Freie Universität Berlin

This dissertation is located at the intersection of three research areas: financial stability, macro-finance, and quantitative economic history. Addressing a major limitation in the literature, I investigate in three separate essays—forming each a chapter of the thesis—the causes and the prediction of banking crises over a very long time horizon. In particular, I explore sources and causes of financial instability other than those of domestic credit built-ups and asset price bubbles and their changing behavior over time. I find that, historically, the majority of banking crises (65%) are not credit booms gone bust but instead are the result of a much wider range of causes. While banking systems have become more resilient against shocks from the real economy with advancing economic development, the share of banking crises of purely financial origin has risen continuously over the past 150 years. Contagion through various types of financial flows is responsible for a quarter of banking crises in modern times. Especially the asset-side exposure of domestic banks to fragile foreign banking systems is a potent channel of international crisis transmission that is active irrespective of domestic financial conditions. Beyond credit aggregates and asset prices, I find that sudden reversals in corporate securities issuance are another helpful predictor of bank distress and recessions previously neglected. This dissertation further contributes to the literature by making available new historical data. It provides a comprehensive database on the causes of banking crises in 46 countries (accompanied by narrative summaries of banking crises in selected major economies) from 1870–2016 and previously unavailable historically consistent quarterly U.S. data on corporate securities issuance and bank loans from 1900–2020.