Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond have developed a scoring system designed to capture whether a failed bank is likely to be put into bankruptcy proceedings, resolved or saved via a government bailout.

Jackson Evert, Arantxa Jarque and John Walter note a complex array of factors combine to determine how easily a bank can be resolved, making “living wills”, or resolution plans, “lengthy, hard to digest and opaque”.

The authors’ “impact score”, described in a recent economic