Political economy of financial crisis duration

Over the last four decades, banking crises around the globe have become longer. Along with the unprecedented government responses to the Great Recession of 2007-2008, protracted financial crises have led scholars to ask if political decisions were somehow to blame. Despite growing concerns, little attention has been paid to the political and institutional determinants of financial crisis duration. This paper considers the role of these factors in determining the duration of systemic banking, currency, sovereign debt, and twin or triple coinciding crises. Relying on an extensive database of 125 countries observed over the 1976-2017 period and estimating a discrete-time duration model, we find that the electoral cycle, political ideology, majority governments, institutional quality and central bank independence matter. This study shows that the duration dynamics of financial crises are idiosyncratic and must be examined individually. Finally, allowing for more flexible duration dependence patterns, we observe that the durations of both banking as well as twin or triple coinciding crises follow a non-monotonic cubic model, while the probability of debt crisis ending declines monotonically over time.