Research
Research
The measurement behind this site is developed in academic work on the history and political economy of U.S. bank supervision.
The Supervisory Compass: 160 Years of What Bank Examiners Focus On
We construct the Supervisory Priorities Index, the first continuous measure of what bank supervisors focus on, from examination documents spanning 1863 to the present across the three federal banking agencies. Institutional architecture explains virtually all variation in supervisory emphasis; financial crises and political transitions contribute little. Formal regulation and supervisory emphasis are complements for codifiable risks but substitutes for judgment-intensive domains. Within-county comparisons of banks facing different regulators show that domain-specific supervisory emphasis moves deposits and lending in economically meaningful ways.
Data availability
The Supervisory Priorities Index and the related panels are documented and downloadable from the data pages under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license.