  Various works have already showed that common shocks and cross-country
financial linkages caused the banking systems of several countries to be highly
interconnected with the result that during bad times, banking crises may arise
simultaneously in different countries. Our aim is to provide further evidence
on the topic using a dataset made by dichotomous banking crises time series for
66 countries from 1800 to 2014. Via the use of heatmap matrices we show that
several countries exhibit pairwise correlation, which means that banking crises
tend to occur in the same year. Clustering analysis suggests that developed
countries (for the most European ones) are highly similar in terms of the path
of events. An analysis of the events that followed the Great Depression and the
Great Recession shows that after the crisis of 2008, banking crises tend to
characterize countries tied by financial links whereas before 2008 contagion
seems to affect countries in the same geographical area. Clustering analysis
shows also that after financial liberalization, crises affected countries with
similar economic structures and growth. Further researches should enlighten the
origin of these linkages investigating how the process of contagion eventually
happens.
