The Racial Political Economy of Bank Entry Restrictions
摘要
While previous research has shown that branching restrictions reduced overall credit supply, more recent research suggests that some borrowers benefitted from these restrictions as credit was kept within a community. However, the impact of unit banking on racial outcomes is still theoretically ambiguous. On the one hand, unit banks tended to favor the wealthy. Thus, branching restrictions could lead to banks not expanding into primarily Black areas, leading to many being underbanked. On the other hand, branching restrictions led to the creation of many Black-owned banks devoted to serving primarily Black areas. Using data from the 1920s, I empirically test these competing arguments using an empirical median voter model.