The Decline of Branch Banking
Description
This repository contains the replication package for "The Decline of Branch Banking" by Rajesh P. Narayanan (Louisiana State University), Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond), and Philip E. Strahan (Boston College and NBER), forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics. The package is a single self-contained folder containing: (1) code/ — R scripts organized into three pipelines: sample-construction/ builds the analysis datasets from raw inputs; paper-results/ produces every table and figure in the body of the paper; internet-appendix/ produces every table and figure in the internet appendix. Three driver scripts (_run_sample_construction.R, _run_paper_results.R, _run_internet_appendix.R) execute the scripts in the required order. (2) data/raw/ — raw input data, including the FDIC Summary of Deposits branch panel (1995–2025), FFIEC Call Reports, RateWatch posted deposit rates (licensed slice covering the products and years used in validation), Advan branch foot-traffic counts (licensed slice), ACS and IRS ZIP-level demographics, FHFA LMI classifications, HMDA and CRA lending aggregates, and county-level economic controls with geographic crosswalks. (3) data/constructed/ — intermediate datasets written by the sample-construction pipeline. (4) Detailed documentation: a README with data availability and provenance statements for every source, computational requirements (R 4.5+), and step-by-step run instructions, plus pseudocode walkthroughs of the closure and opening pipelines.