We characterize the effects of interest rate liberalization on OECD banking crises, controlling for the standard macro prudential variables that prevail in the current literature. We use the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World database. We test for the direct impacts of interest rate liberalization on crisis probabilities and their indirect effects via capital adequacy. Over the period 1980–2012, we find that interest rate liberalization has a crises reducing effect, and it appears that the beneficial effects work by strengthening capital buffers. We also show that when controlling for liberalization, capital adequacy and liquidity, the main driver of financial crises is property price growth. Our results are invariant when we control for alternative sensitivity tests for robustness purposes.

Extant work on costs of financial instability focuses on fiscal costs and declines in aggregate GDP following banking crises. We estimate effects of banking and currency crises on consumption in 19 OECD countries, showing consumption plays an important role in the adjustment following a crisis, and effects are not captured solely by the impact of crises on standard consumption determinants, income and wealth. Additional effects, attributable to factors such as time-varying confidence, uncertainty and credit rationing, are aggravated by high and rising leverage, despite financial liberalisation easing liquidity constraints. High leverage implies that banking crises taking place now could have greater incidence than in the past.

Against the background of the acknowledged importance of off-balance-sheet exposures in the sub prime crisis, we seek to investigate whether this was a new phenomenon or common to earlier crises. Using a logit approach to predicting banking crises in 14 OECD countries we find a significant impact of a proxy for the ratio of banks’ off-balance-sheet activity to total (off and on balance sheet) activity, as well as capital and liquidity ratios, the current account balance and GDP growth. These results are robust to the exclusion of the most crisis prone countries in our model. For early warning purposes we show that real house price growth is a good proxy for off balance sheet activity prior to the sub-prime episode. Variables capturing off-balance sheet activity have been neglected in most early warning models to date. We consider it essential that regulators take into account the results for crisis prediction in regulating banks and their off-balance sheet exposures, and thus controlling their contribution to systemic risk.