A scholar who thinks globally and acts locally
You have probably not forgotten the banking crisis of 2008. But do you remember the banking crises of the 1980s — a series of bank runs that started in 1984? “Unfortunately, banking crises tend to happen fairly often, even though our memory of them fades fairly quickly,” says David Singer, an associate professor of political science at MIT. For most people, it would be good to avoid these periods of crisis — which means understanding why they happen in the first place. That is the subject of an ambitious book project that Singer and his colleague Mark Copelovitch of the University of Wisconsin are undertaking as part of a global examination of the causes of banking crises since the 1970s. “We’re trying to understand why banks in some countries collapse, sometimes in the face of shocks, while other countries seem to have more resilient banking systems,” Singer says. To do...