Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

A Choice Model For Correspondent Banking Relationships, Tanisha Sheth

CMC Senior Theses

Employing a granular hand-collected dataset, this paper studies the formation of local financial networks as a consequence of one of the largest bank failures during the Great Depression. The collapse of the National Bank of Kentucky caused ripples throughout the interbank network as 233 banks were faced with the decision to form new connections to reallocate reserves. Tracing over 1600 institutional linkages between 1929 and 1934, I evaluate the decision-making process of commercial banks under a nested logit framework. I find that peer effects and other regional metrics, contrary to national connectivity measures, act as principal determinants in network formation. …