Financial Crises and Political Radicalization: How Failing Banks Paved Hitler's Path to Power
Journal of Finance 77(6), pp. 3339-3372 (2022)
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Abstract
Do financial crises radicalize voters? We study Germany's 1931 banking crisis, collecting new data on bank branches and firm-bank connections. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in pre-crisis exposure to the bank at the center of the crisis, we show that Nazi votes surged in locations more affected by its failure.
Sebastian Doerr, Stefan Gissler, José-Luis Peydró, Hans-Joachim Voth (2022). “Financial Crises and Political Radicalization: How Failing Banks Paved Hitler's Path to Power.” Journal of Finance.