About
About the project
An independent measurement record of U.S. bank supervision, built from the public documentary record with the tools of modern text and data analysis.
Mission
The history of bank supervision is usually told by its participants. Former regulators, examiners, and bankers write the memoirs and the case studies, and their accounts frame what we believe supervisors were doing in any given era. Those accounts are valuable and often the only source available. They are also selective, retrospective, and impossible to check against the underlying record, because until recently no one had read that record in full.
Our purpose is to open that record. We assemble the public output of the federal banking agencies — annual reports and examination handbooks reaching back to 1863, and the guidance letters, risk perspectives, and filings of the modern period — and turn it into structured, comparable measurement. The result is a common factual basis for a set of questions that are usually answered by assertion: what did supervisors focus on, how did that focus change, how do the three agencies differ, and where does today's emphasis sit against the historical record.
We build this for the people who study, practice, and set bank supervision. For researchers, it is data. For policymakers and supervisors, it is a mirror — a way to see the institution's own priorities measured consistently over time. For practitioners and the public, it is a check: an independent account of the supervisory record that does not depend on the recollection of the people who made it. We take no position on how banks should be supervised. We document what supervision has actually done, and we hold that record open to scrutiny.
Principles
- Public sources only. Every series is built from documents already in the public domain. Nothing here depends on confidential supervisory information.
- Transparent methods. Construction is documented on each data page and in the accompanying research; the measures are reproducible.
- Independence. The project is academic and is not affiliated with, or funded by, any of the agencies it measures.
The team
The Supervisory Compass is developed by three researchers in finance and accounting, longtime collaborators whose work spans academic research and financial-regulatory policy. Full biographies are on their university pages.
- Stephen A. Karolyi Associate Professor of Finance, George Mason University
- Andrew Bird Associate Professor of Finance and Accounting, Chapman University
- Thomas G. Ruchti Assistant Professor of Accounting, Virginia Tech