The distress of Italian commercial banks in 1926-1936: a new dataset from banking supervision archives

This paper documents a new dataset on the distress of Italian joint-stock banks in 1926-1936. It employs classified information from the archives of Italian banking supervision to identify both outright and hidden bank failures. Providing the first all-embracing account of the crisis of small and medium banks in Italy during the Great Depression, it shows that once hidden distress is considered, their crisis was more severe than previously thought. Measured by total assets of banks involved, the distress of joint-stock banks would be considered a 'systemic crisis' by today standards. While previous research has mainly focused on the distress of large universal banks, this research opens new questions on our interpretation of the impact of bank distress in interwar Italy. Important regional patterns emerge, and these should receive more attention in future research