Bank Runs and Financial Disclosure

This book offers the first comparative analysis of politically motivated bank runs in Habsburg Austria, focusing on events in Vienna (1848), Prague (1903), and Ljubljana (1908/09). These episodes have received little attention outside narrow national historiographies. This project brings to light a broader pattern of financial instability driven by political populism and nationalist agitation, thereby filling a significant gap in both financial and historical literature. From the revolutionary upheaval of Vienna in 1848 to the nationalist flashpoints of Prague and Ljubljana in the early 20th century, the book traces how banks confronted waves of public panic by publishing increasingly detailed, sometimes daily, financial reports to stabilize public confidence. Drawing on a wealth of historical newspapers, financial publications, and archival material, the book reveals how these acts of transparency often fuelled controversy rather than calming it. In the absence of strong regulation, voluntary disclosure practices created a precarious information ecosystem. The book analyses that environment, showing how media growth, ethnic conflict, and the demand for quantification intersected to shape a volatile and easily manipulated form of financial trust. The author adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining economic history, media, and accounting studies, rooting the analysis in historical data and mixed methods research including both textual analysis and original quantitative research. Econometric appendices at the end of the book reconstruct time series data on withdrawals, deposits and credit that may be of particular interest to economics scholars. This book will be a valuable insight into a little-known period of financial history, and appeal to researchers from a broad range of fields.