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EVALUATING THE REAL EFFECT OF BANK BRANCHING DEREGULATION
COMPARING CONTIGUOUS COUNTIES ACROSS U.S. STATE BORDERSby Rocco R. Huang
ECB LAMFALUSSY FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMMEIn 2007 all ECB publications feature a motif taken from the €20 banknote.
WO R K I N G PA P E R S E R I E S
CONTENTS
Non-technical summaryThis paper designs a new methodology to evaluate the effects of policy changes that are specific to sub-national regions. The main idea is to compare two neighboring geographic units that are separated by a political border, but are otherwise very similar, to exploit the policy differences that sometimes arise across the border because of some deregulations or reforms that take place early in only one of the two regions.If a policy reform takes place in Michigan, and subsequently Michigan grows faster than the national average; we are tempted to conclude that the reform has produced positive effects. But this may not be a good comparison: When you compare Michigan to Texas, it is quite easy for you to find large growth rate differences, either positive or negative, simply because the two state economies always move in opposite directions. But you can not immediately interpret this as the effect of policy changes in Michigan. This paper's solution is to compare the border areas of two neighboring U.S. states where policies differ across the state border. In these areas, income level, economic structure, etc, are very similar. And more importantly, access to transport, climate, agglomeration economy, etc are similar too. These factors are usually very difficult for econometricians to explicitly control for; but between two neighboring areas these differences are arguably very small. Therefore, the effect of a certain policy change should be more precisely identified by comparing the differential outcomes across the border.In this paper, I use the deregulation of bank geographic expansion i...