An empirically-grounded simulation of bank depositors

There is a wide range of opinion regarding historical and theoretical causes of bank panics and financial crises. Current theory, and theory-based models, find little support in the historical record. This paper examines previous empirical findings based in detailed banking records and offers several new results based on detailed bank data from 1893 Helena, Montana. These findings suggest modeling bank panics as psycho-social events. The Bank Depositor Model (BDM) builds upon a model previously designed to examine emotions within a group (Bosse et al., 2009). BDM represents bank depositor behavior as resulting from a combination of heterogeneous agent (depositor) attributes, views expressed by those in an agents social network and exogenous events that may alter an agents receptiveness to positive or negative views. Initial results conform with the described empirical facts.