Bank Runs and Financial Disclosure

Beschreibung

This book offers the first comparative analysis of politically motivated bank runs in Habsburg Austria, focusing on events in Vienna (1848), Prague (1903), and Ljubljana (1908/09). These episodes have received little attention outside narrow national historiographies. This project brings to light a broader pattern of financial instability driven by political populism and nationalist agitation, thereby filling a significant gap in both financial and historical literature.

From the revolutionary upheaval of Vienna in 1848 to the nationalist flashpoints of Prague and Ljubljana in the early 20th century, the book traces how banks confronted waves of public panic by publishing increasingly detailed, sometimes daily, financial reports to stabilize public confidence. Drawing on a wealth of historical newspapers, financial publications, and archival material, the book reveals how these acts of transparency often fuelled controversy rather than calming it. In the absence of strong regulation, voluntary disclosure practices created a precarious information ecosystem. The book analyses that environment, showing how media growth, ethnic conflict, and the demand for quantification intersected to shape a volatile and easily manipulated form of financial trust. The author adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining economic history, media, and accounting studies, rooting the analysis in historical data and mixed methods research including both textual analysis and original quantitative research. Econometric appendices at the end of the book reconstruct time series data on withdrawals, deposits and credit that may be of particular interest to economics scholars. This book will be a valuable insight into a little-known period of financial history, and appeal to researchers from a broad range of fields.

Jure Stojan holds a PhD in economic and social history from the University of Oxford (2008). Since 2016, he has served as Director of Research at the Inštitut za strateške rešitve in Ljubljana. Previously, he worked as a researcher in the Bank of Slovenia’s Financial Stability Division and as a financial journalist. He was part of the expert team that established the Slovenian Banking Museum, which opened in 2021.

This book offers the first comparative analysis of politically motivated bank runs in Habsburg Austria, focusing on events in Vienna (1848), Prague (1903), and Ljubljana (1908/09). These episodes have received little attention outside narrow national historiographies. This project brings to light a broader pattern of financial instability driven by political populism and nationalist agitation, thereby filling a significant gap in both financial and historical literature.

From the revolutionary upheaval of Vienna in 1848 to the nationalist flashpoints of Prague and Ljubljana in the early 20th century, the book traces how banks confronted waves of public panic by publishing increasingly detailed, sometimes daily, financial reports to stabilize public confidence. Drawing on a wealth of historical newspapers, financial publications, and archival material, the book reveals how these acts of transparency often fuelled controversy rather than calming it. In the absence of strong regulation, voluntary disclosure practices created a precarious information ecosystem. The book analyses that environment, showing how media growth, ethnic conflict, and the demand for quantification intersected to shape a volatile and easily manipulated form of financial trust. The author adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining economic history, media, and accounting studies, rooting the analysis in historical data and mixed methods research including both textual analysis and original quantitative research. Econometric appendices at the end of the book reconstruct time series data on withdrawals, deposits and credit that may be of particular interest to economics scholars. This book will be a valuable insight into a little-known period of financial history, and appeal to researchers from a broad range of fields.

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Jure Stojan

Themen in »Bank Runs and Financial Disclosure«

Bank Runs Financial disclosure Politically motivated bank runs Habsburg Empire financial history transparency in 19th-century banking media influence on bank crises nationalism and savings banks Austria-Hungary bank run data banks' strategic use of financial information financial reporting Populism The Ljubljana Bank Run of 1908/09 The Prague Bank Run of 1903 The Vienna Bank Run of 1848

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