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Using a century of newly constructed data, competing theories explaining banking panics are tested. The evidence shows that banking panics during the U.S. national banking era (1865-1914) were the products of revisions in the perceived risk of the banking system based on the arrival of new information. Panics were triggered by a leading indicator of recession. Whenever this variable reached a threshold level, there was a panic. Thus, panics were not random events. The panics of the 1930s, however, did not result from the same pre-Federal Reserve System pattern of behavior. Copyright 1988 by Royal Economic Society.