Volcker
Comparative empirical testing of theories of banking
What this project is
A comparative empirical test of ~11 theories of banking against 161 years of US banking data plus an international panel, run through Anwar Shaikh's real-competition framework. The method is a structured theory-prediction matrix: 11 schools, 35 thinkers, 96 atomic predictions, 12 formal models, and pre-registered horse races estimated on one harmonised panel so the schools compete on the same data and estimators.
The motivating fact
SVB 2023 met Basel III book-capital rules on the day it failed; the loss was driven by uninsured wholesale funding and held-to-maturity duration mismatch — the Minsky 'position-making' mechanism the dominant prudential framework leaves unnamed. Headline expectation: Minsky position-making (T02.P04) dominates Admati-Hellwig book capital (T06.P01) in failure prediction.
Source: Volcker project README
Headline findings
Correia / Luck / Verner Solvency-Funding Replication (definitive)
The entire CLV replication — modern AND historical — is now reproducible from PUBLIC DATA + PYTHON ALONE. No Stata execution, no isolated machine, no WRDS. Wave 13 closed the one genuine external-data gap with a 30 MB public download and a verified Python reconstruction of the historical starting data: Hist M4 sample = 290,104 obs, LPM AUC IS 0.86427 vs published 0.864, OOS 0.85048 vs published 0.851.
- QA score 0.992
- Tier gates 29/38 PASS · 0 FAIL
- Historical AUC (IS) 0.86427 vs published 0.864
- Historical AUC (OOS) 0.85048 vs published 0.851
Bank-Failure Taxonomy (161-year, 10-dimension)
A 10-dimension taxonomy of 7,027 US bank failures (1865-2023). Mean dimension coverage 0.954 (8/10 dims at 100%). 10/10 named famous failures verified (Continental Illinois, Lincoln S&L, IndyMac, SVB, Penn Square, Colonial 2009, WaMu 2008, ...). 3/3 flagship cascades verified out of 273 detected (2023 regionals, 1933 Bank Holiday 881-bank cascade, Texas S&L 1986-88 904-bank cascade). XGBoost classifier reaches 79.3% agreement with narrative ground truth.
- QA score 0.9675
- Failures classified 7,027
- Mean dimension coverage 0.954
- Famous failures verified 10/10
Explore
Browse all 11 studies with their evidence rollups, or open the data explorer to chart real derived outputs from the bank-failure taxonomy and the Correia replication's series dictionary.