The Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society and The Smith Institute would like to invite you to the next Economic History Seminar Series.

Thursday, April 18, from 3:00– 4:30 p.m.  

Sarah Quincy will present “The Great Depression Bank Deregulation Wave.”

Abstract: We demonstrate that one of the largest waves of bank deregulation in the United States occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression when states, for the first time in their histories, meaningfully relaxed limitations on bank branching. By the eve of the interstate branching deregulations of the 1970s, over 70% of banking offices were already part of a branch network. However, the overall prevalence of branching belies significant and persistent geographic heterogeneity as banking regulation had remained largely unchanged in the subsequent decades. Using a county border pair design, we show that this early wave of deregulation immediately improved financial and economic outcomes, and these gaps continued through the rest of the century.

Sarah Quincy is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. She is also a Britton-Perry Dean's Faculty Fellow in Economic History. Professor Quincy completed her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Davis in 2019 and her B.A. in Mathematical Economics and History at Scripps College in 2011. She is an economic historian working on American macroeconomic and financial history, with particular emphasis on the distributional implications of financial crises. Her recent research analyzes the ways in which banking instability in the 1930s slowed local economies’ recovery from the Great Depression using data on banking, housing, and labor markets.