Bank Structure Conference Impact Study

The first Conference on Bank Structure and Competition was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 1963. Since that time, the Conference has served to stimulate and disseminate policy relevant research on issues affecting the financial services industry and as a forum for debating the relevant policy issues of the day. We evaluate the impact of the Conference on public policy and the banking and finance literature. We provide a qualitative argument that the Conference has helped promote policy change by showing that major financial reforms were typically discussed years earlier at the Conference. We then analyze data from the Social Science Citation Index and find that the Conference has had a strong and systematic impact on the banking and finance literature.