J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 DOI 10.1007/s10693-008-0037-4 Bank Structure Conference Impact Study Douglas D. Evanoff & Philip F. Bartholomew & Robert DeYoung & Cosmin Lucaci & Ronnie J. Phillips Published online: 19 June 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 Abstract 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. Keywords Banking . Financial structure . Bank regulation . Impact study JEL Classification G20 . G28 D. D. Evanoff (*) Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: devanoff@frbchi.org P. F. Bartholomew International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: pbartholomew@imf.org R. DeYoung University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA e-mail: rdeyoung@ku.edu C. Lucaci Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: clucaci@gmail.com R. J. Phillips Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA e-mail: rphillip@lamar.colostate.edu 100 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 The Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has grown from an informal meeting of a few research economists over 40 years ago to its present status as what many consider to be the premier conference on banking research and regulatory issues. The first Conference held in January 1963 was attended by about 20 academics and was prompted by the passage of the Bank Merger Act of 1960 and the desire of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to survey research related to antitrust analysis.1 Over time the Conference has expanded to include over 400 attendees annually and is now known more colloquially as “The Bank Structure Conference” (BSC). Today, the BSC brings together academics, financial executives, regulators, and policymakers from around the world to debate current issues affecting the financial services industry. Earlier reviewers of the Conference noted that it produces two principal results: It stimulates scholarly research and it provides a forum to present and debate important research that helped to shape future policy.2 The purpose of this study is threefold. First, we provide a history of the research presented at the Conference that accounts for the most frequent conference participants, the most often cited conference papers, and the journals and books in which conference papers were eventually published. Second, we document that the major legal and regulatory reforms of the US banking industry were typically discussed years (and in some cases decades) earlier at the BSC—qualitative evidence that the Conference has helped promote policy change. Third, using quantitative information collected from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), we develop a variety of absolute and relative “impact factors” designed to measure the influence that the Conference has had on the banking and finance research literature.3 These research methods are not BSC-specific, and they could be used to analyze the impact of other research conferences. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section we discuss the history of the Conference, highlighting how conference themes and the topics emphasized at the BSC changed over the years as the relevant policy issues of the day evolved. In Section 3 we provide some summary statistics on the make-up of conference papers (i.e., academic research papers versus invited policy presentations), the disposition of the research papers presented at the Conference, the journals in which the research was eventually published, and measures of the leading authors and ‘most valuable’ papers presented at the Conference. In Sections 4 and 5 we develop a methodology to quantify the influence the Conference has had on the scholarly literature in finance and banking, and present results from our analysis based on that methodology. The final section summarizes and concludes. 1 History of the bank structure conference In 1960, Philadelphia National Bank and Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank applied to regulatory authorities to merge the two organizations. They were the second and third largest commercial banks in the local Philadelphia four-county area. The recently passed Bank Merger Act required that the Comptroller of the Currency (the controlling agency since the acquiring bank held a national charter) obtain reports from the Board of 1 The conference has been held annually since 1963 except for 1966 and 1973. 2 For discussions of the history of the conference see Kaufman et al. (1989) and Moskow (2004). 3 The Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), maintained by Thomson Scientific, contains citation, abstract, and bibliographic information from over 1,700 leading scholarly journals in more than 50 social science disciplines. J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 101 Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Justice Department. There was significant disagreement as to the potential impact of the merger on local market competition, but the Comptroller of the Currency approved it based on the public interest argument that any anti-competitive effects would be more than offset by improvements in convenience and the ability to better meet the needs of the local community. The Justice Department challenged the decision based on the Clayton Antitrust Act, arguing that the merger failed the market share test. The case raised three main legal and economic issues. First, did the antitrust laws apply to bank mergers? At the time, the general position was that industry regulation immunized banks from antitrust laws. Second, what was the relevant market for the line of commerce? Arguments were made that the banks competed nationally in certain product lines and that a relatively broad market should be considered. Third, if there were anti-competitive effects, can there be defenses that could override them? The merger proponents argued that there were three major reasons to allow the merger despite any competitive issues; arguments which the lower court had accepted. These defenses were that the merger was a means of allowing the bank to provided superior service by following customers to the suburbs, that the merger would create an entity of sufficient size and capacity to compete with New York City banks and other large banks nationwide, and that obtaining this capability would stimulate local economic development. The case proceeded through the courts until the Supreme Court reversed the lower court and disallowed the merger based on a market share test and the resulting potential adverse competitive implications (United States 1963). The Supreme Court argued that the antitrust laws did indeed apply to banking, and that antitrust law was not precluded by the facts that banks were a regulated industry or that the regulators considered competitive factors in evaluating mergers. The court also ruled that the relevant market was the local market, aligning with the argument that much of banking is a local business. Finally, the court was not convinced that the three defenses offered by proponents of the merger were sufficient to override the adverse competitive implications. This case marked an abrupt change in the regulation of bank mergers. Suddenly, bank regulatory agencies, and the Justice Department, were required to consider competitive factors in addition to banking factors when evaluating bank merger applications.4 The bank regulatory agencies were ill-prepared for the challenge ahead of them. Staff at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors immediately set out to develop standards and procedures for analyzing merger applications, decide what type of market analysis was needed, collect the necessary data to conduct these analyses, and initiate research aimed at more fully understanding the intricacies of the relationship between market structure and performance. The Board also encouraged the Reserve Banks to survey the existing literature on bank structure, consider potential mitigating factors to evaluate when analyzing mergers, and develop their own research agenda on these issues. In January 1963, the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank held a meeting with local academics to discuss current research in the microeconomics of financial markets and to encourage future research efforts evaluating the structure–performance relationship and appropriate means to identify the relevant banking market. About 20 academics met and, following a thorough analysis of the issues, agreed that a follow-up meeting was merited. Those followup meetings continue to this day and are formally know as the Bank’s Conference on Bank Structure and Competition. 4 Today, for merger purposes, the Justice Department treats banks similar to firms in other commercial and industrial sectors. 102 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Not surprising, in the early years of the Conference the primary focus was on evaluating bank performance. How did one measure competition? What was the relevant banking market? What was the relationship between market structure and bank performance? What were the effects of bank mergers? What additional factors other than market structure should be considered in evaluating the advisability of bank mergers? While the issues facing the banking industry have obviously changed through the years, it is telling that these traditional, fundamental issues continue to resurface as conference themes to this day. The conference format changed in 1982 when the coordinators decided to significantly increase the role of industry executives. Since its inception, the Conference had been dominated by research economists from regulatory agencies and academia. Occasionally, financial executives were invited to the Conference to ‘bring the economists down from their ivory towers’ and better integrate their analysis with the hands-on industry experience. The decision was made in 1982 to infuse a mixture of academics, regulators, policymakers and industry personnel into the fabric of the conference, in order to more thoroughly critique and analyze the financial policy issues of the day. That mixture continues to this day, with about half of the conference sessions consisting of scholarly research presented in a manner similar to that found at most national and regional economics or finance association meetings, and the other half of the sessions combining research (presented in a non-technical manner) with commentary from industry experts and policymakers. The mixture can be difficult at times, but it requires the presenters to take into account the alternative perspectives being provided and better justify their reasoning. As described above, the Conference was born out of the need to respond to, and effectively execute, laws and court decisions that had already been enacted. While analysis of the structure–conduct–performance paradigm in banking, and competitive analysis more generally, dominated the early years of the Conference, it did not take long for the discussion to turn to a debate of alternative policy issues, including the merits of regulatory reform. This can readily be seen in the comments of Ross Robertson in 1970 when he chastised the industry and its regulators, and stressed the need to eliminate entrenched restrictions to competition within the industry.5 This movement toward providing evidence on the (de)merits of existing regulation, in consort with implicit and explicit attempts to influence future industry policy, came to define the role and significance of the Conference. While still referred to as ‘The Bank Structure Conference,’ over the years the topics covered expanded significantly to encompass financial markets more generally, and the broader financial services industry instead of banking per se. Since its inception, nearly every major reform in bank regulation was critically evaluated at the Conference many years before actual regulatory or legislative action was taken. For example: & 5 6 Secular declines in bank capital levels in the US accompanied by increased economic instability prompted regulators to formally impose minimum capital requirements in the early 1980s.6 These issues had been extensively discussed during the 1970s at the Conference and served as a central theme of the Conference in 1975.7 The imposition of regulatory capital requirements was later followed by international coordination among the Group of Ten (G-10) central banks to apply common minimum capital Robertson (1970). For a review of US bank capital trends and the 1981 and 1988 reforms see Talley (1983) and Wall (1989). See, for example, Mingo and Wolkowitz (1974), Greenbaum and Taggart (1975), Butler (1975), Santomero and Watson (1975) and Beighley et al. (1975). 7 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 & & & & 103 standards to their banking industries by year-end 1992: the Basel Capital Accord. The effort to insure bank capital adequacy continues today with efforts to agree upon and implement a more comprehensive measure and minimum standard for capital adequacy: the Basel II Capital Framework. In more recent years the Conference has emphasized the issues associated with Basel I and Basel II, and how implementation should proceed.8 The FDIC Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) mandated risk-based deposit insurance premiums and required that regulators implement prompt corrective supervisory action on banks, including closing the bank prior to insolvency—that is, when they still had positive net worth. Both concepts had been discussed as early as 1968 at the Conference, and dominated many of the sessions during the 1980s.9 The Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 made interstate banking and branching possible on a nationwide basis. This followed decades of research presentations at the Conference suggesting that there were significant benefits to be realized from allowing broader geographic expansion. Early discussions emphasized that while national concentration levels would obviously increase with broader expansion, the impact on local market competition could differ significantly, resulting in increased competition and the associated benefits for customers10 Recommendations were also made for broader expansion at the intra-state level as well as expansion into regional compacts—since that was the only way at the time that inter-state restrictions could be skirted.11 The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, therefore greatly relaxing the barriers between commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies in the US. As early as 1971, conference authors were taking positions about the merits of diversification within holding companies. This discussion continued at the Conference over the next two decades.12 In 1987, still a full decade before the passage of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the theme of the Conference emphasized issues associated with the ‘merging of commercial and investment banking activities.’ In 2007, the major conference theme dealt with a related issue: the mixing of banking and commerce, which had become extremely topical in the popular banking literature because of the proliferation of industrial loan corporations (ILCs) and applications to enter this industry by large non-banks such as Target, Home Depot, and WalMart. However, the issues associated with combining banking and commerce had been critically reviewed at the Conference as early as 1984.13 After years of debate about the health of the savings and loan industry, in 1989 Congress passed the Federal Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA). The goal was to bring to an end what had by that time become well recognized as a major financial industry fiasco. Not only had failure rates among depository institutions been greater during this period than at any other time since the 8 See Carey and Hrycay (2000), Gordy (2000), Herring (2002), Brown et al. (2002), Hancock and Passmore (2005), Bernanke (2006) and Kane (2007). 9 See Tussing (1968), and later discussions by Buser et al. (1980), Bierwag and Kaufman (1983), Boyd (1983), Pennacchi (1985), Avery et al. (1985) and Kaufman (1991). 10 See Shull (1972), Gibson (1974), Fraser and Rose (1975), Seaver and Fraser (1976) and Evanoff and Fortier (1986). 11 See Eisenbeis (1981), Frieder (1984), Storrs (1984), Theobald (1984) and Frieder (1990). 12 See Chase (1971), Gilbert (1971), Boreham (1971), Saunders (1984) and Giddy (1984). See Shull (1984), Goodman et al. (1984), Wall et al. (2007), Adams et al. (2007) and Hao et al. (2007). 13 104 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Great Depression, but losses per dollar of deposits resulting from these failures were unprecedented in US history.14 These issues had been thoroughly scrutinized, and industry regulatory authorities occasionally chastised, at the Conference nearly a decade before FIRREA was passed.15 This list could be expanded to cover a number of additional issues for which reform has been implemented, or is currently being considered. Such topics include: the activities and oversight of government sponsored enterprises; alternative means to introduce increased market discipline into the supervision/oversight of bank activities; bank lending behavior, including loans targeted through the Community Reinvestment Act and fair lending activity; and reforms to the bank regulatory structure, the bank safety net, and bank resolution processes. It is difficult to quantify the impact of a conference. In the above discussion we have attempted to show that that the Bank Structure Conference has served as a forum for research economists, legislators, regulators, industry consultants and industry representatives to critically debate the important financial policy issues of the day. While it is difficult to explicitly measure the eventual impact of these debates on public policy, there is little doubt that over the past 30 years the Conference has provided an important platform from which both policymakers, and those wanting to provide input to the policy process, were able to engage in this debate. In contrast, we may be better able to measure the impact of the research presented at the Conference on the scholarly literature in banking and finance. The key quantitative elements at our disposal are ‘citation counts,’ which measure the number of times published research papers are cited in the future by other researchers. By tracking the citations to published research papers presented at the BSC, and comparing them to citation counts for non-BSC research papers, we can make a quantitative assessment of the impact of the Conference on the scholarly literature. In turn, this provides an indirect measure of the impact of the Conference on policy change, because the research literature is an important font from which policy reform springs. We conduct this analysis following a discussion of the most common research outlets for research presented at the BSC, the leading presenters, and leading articles based on citation counts. 2 Summary statistics In this section we provide some summary statistics on the research presented at the Conference and highlight individuals that have made the most presentations as well as the most ‘recognized’ presentations. Over the 1963–2005 period there were 1,169 presentations made at 41 Conferences. These presentations can be categorized as ‘research papers’ or ‘invited papers’. Research papers are those that were submitted and accepted for inclusion on the conference program through the annual ‘call for papers’ and review process. These are typically works by research economists with an ultimate goal of publishing the study in a professional or academic journal. Invited papers on the program are those typically provided by industry or regulatory experts with no future goal of publication in the academic literature. Thus, for example, Alan Greenspan’s 16 keynote presentations during 14 See Barth (1991), FDIC (1997) and Evanoff (1994). 15 See Rosenblum (1980), Kane (1982) and Barth et al. (1985). J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Fig. 1 Disposition of BSC research presentations (1980–2005) 105 Never Published 14% Upcoming/ Under Review 7% No Data 4% SSCI Journals 44% Non SSCI Journals or Books 31% his tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman are included as invited presentations.16 Of the total conference presentations, 604 were research papers (52%) and 565 were invited presentations (48%). This highlights the abovementioned conference ‘mixture’ of highquality research with industry and regulatory expertise. To gather additional information on the research papers presented at the Conference, authors were surveyed and web searches were conducted to determine where papers were eventually published.17 Combined, these two methods enabled us to determine the eventual outcomes for 96% of the research presented over the 1963–2005 period. Figure 1 shows the disposition of that research. Some 75% of conference research papers were published in academic journals or books, and a majority of those publications were in journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).18 The 75% figure actually understates the acceptance rate of research presented at the Conference because 7% of the presentations were either already accepted for forthcoming publication, or were under journal review at the time of our analysis.19 Thus the vast majority of research presented at the Conference was eventually published, with nearly half published in SSCI listed journals. 16 This is not to imply that the invited papers were not provided by research economists. Occasionally, established scholars have been asked to serve on conference panels as experts on the topic being considered, or to provide keynote presentations (see Bernanke 2006). Additionally, in the early years of the conference, research economists from the various regulatory agencies were invited to participate in the conference and summarize research being conducted in their respective departments. 17 Analysis of citation data in an attempt to measure the “influence” of research articles has also been performed by Borokhovich et al. (1994, 2000). We cannot directly analyze the citations of the presentations at the conference because the Conference Proceedings is simply a compilation of working papers provided to conference participants that is not extensively cited (nor, obviously, is it included in SSCI). In fact, there is an explicit statement on the Proceeding’s inside-cover indicating that the papers “should be cited as working papers and considered preliminary drafts of any subsequent publication.” 18 Although measuring journal quality is an inexact science, inclusion in the SSCI is generally considered a measure of quality or influence. Journals are continually compared over time to determine whether they warrant inclusion in the Index or, if already included, should be dropped from the Index. The SSCI claims to include “the world’s leading scholarly social sciences journals.” 19 Forthcoming articles were excluded from the ‘published’ numbers because we are particularly interested in citation counts, which obviously are very limited or nonexistent prior to the article actually being published. 106 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Table 1 lists the leading publication outlets for the research presented at the Conference. Many of the journals on this list are well recognized as vehicles for high-quality research addressing policy related issues associated with the financial services sector. The list includes both “field” and “general” journals; the large number of BSC research published in the latter is impressive, given that these journals are often not particularly receptive to policy related and/or banking related research articles. In our analysis below, we examine the relative impact of BSC research papers and non-BSC research papers published in these journals. Once a research paper is published, the best quantitative measure of its impact on the research literature is the number of times it is cited by authors of other published research papers. Table 2 lists the ten economics, finance, and banking journals in which the published versions of Conference research papers have been most frequently cited. Not surprisingly, the list of journals in which BSC articles are cited is similar to the list of journals in which BSC articles are published. Journal citation counts form the underlying basis of our conference impact analysis presented below. Who have been the major contributors to the Conference? Table 3 lists the most frequent presenters at the Conference, including both research and invited presentations, while Table 4 considers only the research oriented presentations. The individuals in the latter list are those most responsible for the publications and citations in Tables 1 and 2. This list of researchers is quite impressive and (subjectively) reads like a Who’s Who of scholars in the financial regulatory literature, led by Allen Berger and Edward Kane. Table 5 lists the 15 most frequently cited articles out of all the research presented at the Bank Structure Conference since its inception. The well known relationship-lending piece by Allen Berger and Greg Udell leads all articles presented at the conference, and the remainder of the list consists of articles that are very well known in the finance and banking literature. 3 Impact of a research conference on the scholarly literature: methodology We have two goals for the following two sections of the paper: first, to develop a quantitative approach for measuring the impact of a research conference on the associated Table 1 Number of BSC research presentations published in SSCI-listed economics, finance, or banking journals, 1963–2005 (minimum six publications) Number of presentations 55 38 30 31 20 13 11 10 9 9 9 7 7 6 Journal Journal of Banking and Finance Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking Journal of Finance Journal of Financial Services Research Journal of Financial Economics Journal of Financial Intermediation Journal of Business Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis American Economic Review Journal of Monetary Economics Journal of Bank Research Review of Financial Studies Research in Finance Review of Economics and Statistics J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Table 2 SSCI-listed journals in which published BSC papers have been most frequently cited, 1963–2005 107 Number of citations 602 251 235 162 131 102 64 63 56 51 Journal Journal of Banking and Finance Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking Journal of Finance Journal of Financial Services Research Journal of Financial Economics Journal of Financial Intermediation Journal of Monetary Economics Journal of Business Review of Financial Studies Journal of Risk and Insurance academic literature; and second, to apply that approach to the research papers presented at the Bank Structure Conference (BSC) between 1980 and 2005. While the summary statistics presented above describe presentations made at the BSC from 1963 through the 2005 Conference, the remainder of our analysis will focus on papers presented at the Conferences from 1980 through 2005. We begin our examination with an existing analytical tool—the citation-based journal impact factor, or JIF—which we use as the basis for constructing a variety of citation-based conference impact factors, or CIFs. To establish the absolute impact of the research presented at the BSC over the years, we construct CIFs based on the citations garnered by the conference papers once they are published in refereed journals. To establish the relative impact of the research presented at the BSC over the years, we compare these CIFs to the JIFs of leading economics, finance, and banking journals. Depending on which variant of these approaches that we apply to the data, our results suggest that (a) the Bank Structure Conference (represented collectively by the set of research papers presented at the conference over time) has had a moderate-to-substantial impact on the academic literature, and (b) the individual papers appearing on the Bank Structure Conference are cited more often than would be expected for the journals in which these papers are eventually published. If we include all of the research papers on the BSC program in a given year in our calculations, then the implied CIF for the typical BSC paper is similar to the JIF for top banking field journals (e.g., Journal of Money, Credit and Banking; and Journal of Banking and Finance). But if we constrain the CIF so that it is based only on those conference papers that were eventually published in a journal covered by the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), then the Bank Structure Conference CIF increases and becomes similar to the JIF for general economics and finance journals (e.g., Journal of Business; Review of Economics and Statistics; Journal of Finance). And if we further constrain our comparisons so that they compare the citation-based impact of individual BSC research papers to the JIFs of the journals in which they are published— that is, a head-to-head comparison of the articles within a journal of given quality—then we find that the BSC papers systematically receive more citations than the non-BSC papers in both field journals and in general journals, regardless of perceived or reported journal quality. In the process of this analysis, we also discover several interesting characteristics of the standard journal impact factor measures that are regularly used to gauge the absolute and relative quality of academic journals and academic departments. First, although the standard JIF is based on citation counts occurring within 2 years of the publication, we show that this 108 Table 3 Leading presenters at the BSC, 1963–2005 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Number of presentations 24 22 17 16 12 12 11 11 11 10 10 10 10 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 8 8 8 8 8 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 Presenter Berger A Kane E Kaufman G Greenspan A Passmore W Eisenbeis R Brewer E Flannery M Frieder L Mote L Murphy N Udell G Wall L Benston G DeYoung R Ely B Hanweck G Kroszner R Saunders A Strahan P Calomiris C Gorton G Hughes J Rosenblum H Thomson J Baer H Carey M Garcia G Glassman C Moon C Morgan D Rajan R Shaffer S Shull B Wilcox J is probably a relatively poor measure of the absolute impact of the published article since the majority of citations to finance and banking papers occur more than 2 years after these papers are published. Hence, a proper analysis of the impact of published articles on the associated discipline may require a longer window of citation data, which we analyze in robustness tests. Second, we show that citations-per-published-article in finance and banking journals have been increasing systematically over the past 25 years. This suggests that inter-temporal comparisons of citation counts can be misleading across long periods of time, and we take care to shield our results from this potential bias. Third, although we have access to the citation data underlying the off-the-shelf journal impact factors published by the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), we were unable to exactly replicate their published results. Our calculations nearly always resulted in lower journal impact factors (that is, fewer citations per paper on average), although the rank ordering of journals was not affected by our calculations. J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Table 4 Leading presenters of research papers at the BSC, 1963–2005 109 Presenter Number of presentations Allen Berger Edward Kane George Kaufman Elijah Brewer Robert Eisenbeis Mark Flannery Wayne Passmore Robert DeYoung Gerald Hanweck Anthony Saunders Philip Strahan Larry Wall 24 19 12 11 11 10 10 9 9 9 9 9 3.1 Journal impact factors The conventional, “off-the-shelf” JIF measures the number of citations in year t journal articles that refer to articles published in journal j during the previous 2 years: JIFj;t ð2Þ ¼ t 1 t 2 Cj;t þ Cj;t Ajt 1 þ Ajt 2 ð1Þ t 1 t 2 where Cj;t þ Cj;t represents the number of citations C that appeared in year t journal articles referring to articles published in journal j in years t−1 and/or t−2; Atj 1 þ Ajt 2 represents the number of articles published in journal j in years t−1 and t−2; and the parenthetical (2) indicates that the calculation is based on articles published over a 2-year period. A value of JIFj,t (2)=1.0 indicates that the typical article published in journal j over this 2-year period had an annual citation rate of once per year. This formula in Eq. 1 easily generalizes to more than two periods. Expanding beyond 2 years theoretically could result in either an increase or decrease in the annual citation rate, depending on how quickly the knowledge created by the journal article disseminates into use by other scholars, how quickly those scholars apply that knowledge, and how long it takes before this “second generation” of research itself is published in journals. Figure 2 illustrates the case of research papers published in four leading economics, finance, and banking journals (American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking). The figure plots the number of citations in SSCI-listed journals that refer to articles published in each of these journals, and how many years elapsed between the original publication and the publication in which it was cited (we include the first 10 years following publication). For each of these journals, the number of annual citations increases in the first, second, and third years after an article is published; peaks in either the third, fourth, or fifth year after publication; and then very slowly declines after that. For our purposes, two implications can be drawn from Fig. 2. First, the standard 2-year JIF clearly understates the absolute number of annual citations received by the typical journal article. However, since the citation patterns for the four journals plotted in the figure follow similar increasing and decreasing patterns over time, it is unlikely that the standard 2-year JIF measure generates grossly incorrect relative JIF journal rankings. Second, if one 110 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Table 5 BSC research presentations cited most frequently in SSCI-listed journals, 1980–2005 Citations 154 147 135 112 84 83 81 80 74 68 61 60 59 57 50 Presentations/Publications Berger AN and GF Udell Relationship lending and lines of credit in small firm finance Journal of Business, 1995 Benveniste LM and PA Spindt How investment bankers determine the offer price and allocation of new issues Journal of Financial Economics, 1989 Keeley MC Deposit insurance, risk, and market power in banking American Economic Review, 1990 Berger AN, GA Hanweck, and DB Humphrey Competitive viability in banking—scale, scope, and product mix economies Journal of Monetary Economics, 1987 Nance DR, CW Smith, and CW Smithson On the determinants of corporate hedging Journal of Finance, 1993 Benston GJ, GA Hanweck, and DB Humphrey Scale economies in banking—a restructuring and reassessment Journal of Money Credit and Banking, 1982 Berger AN and GF Udell Collateral, loan quality, and bank risk Journal of Monetary Economics, 1990 Buser SA, AH Chen, and EJ Kane Federal deposit insurance, regulatory policy, and optimal bank capital Journal of Finance, 1981 Brickley JA and CM James The takeover market, corporate-board composition, and ownership structure—the case of banking Journal of Law and Economics, 1987 Gilligan T, M Smirlock, and W Marshall Scale and scope economies in the multi-product banking firm Journal of Monetary Economics Prowse SD The structure of corporate-ownership in Japan Journal of Finance, 1992 Saunders A, E Strock, and NG Travlos Ownership structure, deregulation, and bank risk-taking Journal of Finance, 1990 Berger AN, Saunders A, JM Scalise, and GF Udell The effects of bank mergers and acquisitions on small business lending Journal of Financial Economics, 1998 Kroszner RS and RG Rajan Is the glass-steagall act justified? the us experience with universal banking before 1933 American Economic Review, 1994 Flannery MJ and SM Sorescu Evidence of bank market discipline in subordinated debenture yields Journal of Finance, 1996 were to expand JIFs to include more than 2-years of publications, we would expect the average annual number of citations to increase as the data included were expanded from 2 years to about 5 years, and then decline as the data included were expanded to 6 years and beyond. J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 111 12,000 10,000 8,000 AER 6,000 JOF JMCB 4,000 JFQA 2,000 0 No Lag 1 Year lag 2 Year Lag 3 Year Lag 4 Year Lag 5 Year Lag 6 Year Lag 7 Year lag 8 Year lag 9 Year lag 10 Year lag Fig. 2 The number of SSCI citations during each of the first 10 years after publication for articles published between 1975 and 2005 in four leading economics, finance, and banking journals. Journals included are the American Economic Review; Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; Journal of Finance; and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 3.2 Conference impact factors We propose three different conference impact factors to measure the impact of a research conference—more accurately, the papers presented at the BSC—on the associated scholarly literature. We derive the first of these CIFs indirectly from the JIFs of the journals in which the conference papers eventually appear (the indirect CIF); this measure can be thought of as a gauge of the quality of the conference program. The second of these CIFs is a more direct analog to the JIF, constructed using the actual citations to the published versions of the conference papers (the direct CIF); in a sense, in this case we think of the conference as a virtual journal composed of its eventually published papers, and construct a JIF for this virtual journal. The third of these CIFs focuses on individual journals, one at a time, and compares the citation counts for the conference articles and non-conference articles that are published in that specific journal (the journal-specific CIF); this is a head-to-head comparison that tests whether the conference imparts reputational quality to the papers presented at it. Each of these CIFs focuses on a different feature of conference quality and scholarly impact, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. The indirect conference impact factor is a simple weighted average of the JIFs from the journals in which conference papers were eventually published: indirect CIFs ð2Þ ¼ J
 P Pj;s  JIFj;t ð2Þ j¼1 notpubs þ J P ð2Þ Pj;s j¼1 where the weights Pj,s are the number of papers presented at the conference in year s (s<t) that were eventually published in journal j in year t, and notpubs is the number of papers 112 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 presented at the conference in year s that were either published in a non-SSCI journal (for which no JIF exists) or were never published. The parenthetical (2) indicates that the calculation is based on articles published over a 2 year period, and, again, is easily generalized to more than 2 years. Equation 2 does not measure the quality of the conference papers themselves, but rather infers the quality of the conference indirectly from the JIFs for the journals in which the conference articles are eventually published. Stated differently, this index assumes that the academic impact of a conference paper published in journal j is identical to the academic impact of the average journal j article. As defined above in Eq. 2, the indirect CIF is a conservative measure because it includes in the denominator the number of year t conference papers that were never published or were published in non-SSCI journals for which JIFs are not available. We will also calculate a liberal version of the indirect CIF in which we set notpub=0. It is not clear which version is preferred; the former focuses on the impact of the conference program as a whole, while the latter focuses on the impact of the conference papers that entered the mainstream finance and banking academic literatures. (As discussed above, about 44% of the research papers presented at the Bank Structure Conference since 1980, as well as nearly 60% of all published BSC research papers, have been published in SSCI-listed journals.) The direct conference impact factor is constructed directly from the citation counts that conference papers receive once they are published in academic journals: direct CIFð2Þ ¼
notpubt 1 Ctt 1 þ Ctt 2 
þ At 1 þ notpubt 2 þ At 2  ð3Þ where Ctt 1 þ Ctt 2 represents the number of citations C that appeared in any year t journal that referred to articles presented at the conference in years t−1 and t−2; At −1 and At −2 are the number of papers presented at the conference in years t−1 and t−2 that were eventually published in a journal; and notpubt−1 and notpubt−2 are the number of papers presented at the conference in years t−1 and t−2 that were either published in a non-SSCI journal (for which no JIF exists) or were never published. Again, this is a 2-year version impact factor [denoted by the (2)] and is easily generalized to more than 2 years. As before, setting notpub=0 generates a more liberal version of this measure. The direct CIF is an analog to the JIF measure 1, because it treats the conference as a “virtual journal” composed of the conference papers that are eventually published in academic journals. The journal-specific conference impact factor is calculated once for each journal in which conference papers have been published during the sample period in question, based on an aggregation of citation data across that sample period: journal  tþ1 tþ2  T X Cj;t þ Cj;t  specific CIFj ð2Þ ¼   2  A j;t t¼1 ð4Þ conference papers tþ2 where Ct;tþ1 j þ Ct; j represents the number of citations C that appeared in year t+1 and t+2 journals that referred to articles published in journal j in year t; At,j is the number of articles published in journal j in year t; multiplying the  denominator by 2 imposes the same scale as the standard JIF in Eq. 1; and the constraint conference papers limits the expression to include tþ2 only articles Atj and citations Ct;tþ1 j þ Ct; j to articles that were presented at the conference during the sample period and subsequently published in journal j. Note that Eq. 4 is a forward-looking measure, and is calculated based on citations that appear after the J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 113 conference. We evaluate the magnitude of the journal specific CIF by comparing it to the following benchmark measure, which we calculate for each journal j:  1 0   T
B 1 C X  B C weighted JIFj ¼ B T Aj;t  JIFj;t ð2Þ  ð5Þ C  @ P A t¼1  Aj;t  t¼1 conference articles where the weights Aj;t are the number of conference articles published in journal j in each year t, the JIF term is a forward-looking journal impact factor calculated separately for each journal j in a fashion similar to Eq. 4; and the constraint jconference articles limits the expression to include only articles At,j that were presented at the conference during the sample period and subsequently published in journal j. Because we calculate both Eqs. 4 and 5 separately for each journal j, this is a head-to-head comparison that controls for journal quality. Hence, if we find that journal specific CIF>weighted JIF, then we might conclude that the conference has some reputation or profile that gets imparted to its papers and causes them to be cited more often than the other journal j articles. 4 Impact of the BSC on the banking and finance literature: results We now apply the tools developed in the previous section to the publication and citation data for papers presented at Bank Structure Conference (BSC) between 1980 and 2005. To begin our analysis, we calculate the “conservative” version of the 2-year direct CIF for BSC data between 1980 and 2002, and plot it in Fig. 3.20 The data reveal a substantial upward trend for citations to BSC papers over time, from about 0.2 citations per conference paper in the early 1980s to about 0.8 citations per conference paper in 2002. The slope of the linear trend line is 0.0309 and is statistically significant—on average, citations to the average BSC paper have been increasing over time at a rate of about 0.31 citations every 10 years. For comparison, we plot the annual average (un-weighted) 2-year JIF for a peer group of 19 economics, finance, and banking journals in Fig. 4.21 The number of citations to the articles published in these peer journals also trends up over time, from about 0.7 citations per year to about 1.0 citations per year, an annual increase of about 0.14 citations every 10 years. We draw two conclusions from this analysis. First, although the typical research paper appearing on the BSC program (that is, including those that were never published) has tended to receive fewer citations than the typical article published in these peer journals, this quality gap has been closing over time. Second, because the implications of these unequal rates of change will be lost in any full-sample calculations, we will report our results two different ways in the tables below: averages over the full 1980–2005 time period, and in separate 5-year averages. Table 6 displays full-sample and 5-year averages for the 2-year indirect CIF for the BSC papers, calculated based on the number of conference papers published each year in 12 leading economics, finance, and banking journals listed by the SSCI and in which BSC papers have often been published. For comparison, the table also shows the average 2-year JIFs (Eq. 1) for each of these peer journals, arrayed in declining order based on the 20 We exclude data on conference papers in 2003 through 2005 because, as shown in Fig. 2, it takes several years for published papers to begin garnering citations. 21 These 19 peer journals are the ones listed in Tables 7 and 8. 114 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 y = 0.0309x + 0.0729 R2 = 0.4966 0.2 0.0 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 Bank Structure 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 Linear (Bank Structure) Fig. 3 Bank Structure Conference 2-year conference impact factors, 1980–2005 full-sample averages. We display both the conservative and liberal versions of the CIFs. The liberal CIF calculation indicates that the average published paper from the BSC is cited slightly less frequently than articles in the very top general journals (e.g., Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, American Economic Review), while the conservative CIF calculation indicates that the average research paper presented at the BSC is cited about as frequently as articles published in the top banking field journals (e.g., Journal of Financial Intermediation, and Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking). 1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 y = 0.0138x + 0.6598 R2 = 0.5203 0.4 0.2 0.0 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 Index 2 Year 1994 1996 1998 2000 Linear (Index 2 Year) Fig. 4 Two-year journal impact factor for 19 banking, economics and finance journals 2002 2004 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 115 Table 6 Indirect conference impact factors for the Bank Structure Conference (Eq. 2), compared to journal impact factors for selected journals (Eq. 1). Five- and 25-year averages are displayed in cells, and all of the impact factors underlying these averages are based on 2 years of citation data. The journals are ranked in order of the 1980–2005 data column Journal Journal of Financial Economics Journal of Finance American Economic Review Journal of Business Journal of Monetary Economics BSC (liberal) Review of Economics and Statistics Journal of Money, Credit and Banking Journal of Financial Intermediation Financial Management Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analsyis BSC (conservative) Journal of Banking and Finance Public Finance 1980– 1984 1985– 1989 1990– 1994 1995– 1999 2000– 2005 1980– 2005 2.67 1.10 1.57 1.04 1.27 0.61 0.81 0.81 – 0.78 0.34 0.15 0.25 0.15 3.62 1.36 1.74 1.15 1.82 0.84 0.88 1.06 – 0.64 0.61 0.33 0.24 0.35 2.29 2.00 1.60 3.00 1.21 0.94 0.52 0.80 – 0.65 0.67 0.33 0.35 0.16 2.15 2.19 1.77 0.95 1.18 1.20 0.95 0.89 0.69 1.10 0.62 0.70 0.48 – 2.70 3.08 1.75 1.28 1.37 1.43 1.31 0.84 0.99 0.97 1.20 0.86 0.64 – 2.66 1.98 1.69 1.58 1.35 0.99 0.90 0.88 0.84 0.80 0.69 0.46 0.41 – Remember that the indirect CIF is essentially a weighted average of the JIFs in which conference papers are published, so that the comparisons shown here are based on the assumption that published BSC papers are cited no more, or no less, frequently than the typical article published in each of these peer journals. Table 7 displays full-sample and 5-year averages for the 2-year direct CIF for the BSC papers, compared to the average 2-year JIFs from a wider set of 19 SSCI-listed journals. Although these direct CIFs are based on the actual citations to published BSC papers, the findings are quite similar to those in Table 6 for the indirect CIFs: The average published paper from the BSC is cited slightly less frequently than articles in the very top general journals, while the conservative CIF calculation indicates that the average research paper presented at the BSC is cited about as frequently as articles published in the top banking field journals. The similarities between the rankings in Tables 6 and 7 suggest that the average BSC paper published in journal j is cited about as often as the average non-BSC paper published in journal j. However, the rankings in these tables are rather crude comparisons, and we will investigate this issue more closely below using the journal specific CIF methodology. Before doing so, we test whether the rankings in Tables 6 and 7, which are based on 2-year calculations, are sensitive to the number of years used in the calculations. We know from Fig. 2 that the majority of citations occur more than 2 years after an article is published, and this allows for the possibility that the rankings in the tables may be biased. Indeed, Fig. 5 shows that the inter-temporal citation pattern for published BSC papers is quite different from the pattern of citations to published articles in the four leading journals used to construct Fig. 2. (To facilitate this comparison, we constructed Fig. 5 in percentage terms rather than raw numbers of citations.) Therefore we re-calculated the average fullsample results for Table 7 using 3-, 4-, and 5-year versions of the appropriate CIFs and JIFs. Because “off-the-shelf” journal impact factors are available only in the 2-year format, we had to calculate both the CIFs and the JIFs ourselves, using citation data from the SSCI 116 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Table 7 Direct conference impact factors for the Bank Structure Conference (Eq. 3), compared to journal impact factors for selected journals (Eq. 1). Five- and 25-year averages are displayed in cells, and all of the impact factors underlying these averages are based on 2 years of citation data. The journals are ranked in order of the 1980–2005 data column Journals Journal of Financial Economics Journal of Economic Perspectives Review of Financial Studies American Economic Review Journal of Finance Journal of Accounting and Economics BSC (liberal) Journal of Monetary Economics Journal of Business Review of Economics and Statistics Journal of Financial Intermediation Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Journal of Money, Credit and Banking BSC (conservative) Real Estate Economics Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics Journal of Banking and Finance Financial Management Journal of Financial Services Research Journal of Financial Research Journal of Portfolio Management 1980– 1985 1986– 1990 1991– 1995 1996– 2000 2001– 2005 1980– 2005 1.86 – – 1.14 0.44 0.85 1.21 0.97 0.66 0.58 – 0.17 0.38 0.20 – – 0.16 0.24 – – – 2.69 – – 1.35 0.77 1.04 0.66 1.35 0.84 0.61 – 0.56 0.55 0.28 – – 0.14 0.17 0.53 0.27 0.08 1.69 1.50 1.69 1.44 1.22 1.19 1.13 0.99 0.75 0.38 – 0.55 0.54 0.44 – 0.47 0.26 0.19 0.18 0.21 0.07 1.89 1.88 1.19 1.52 1.36 0.54 1.19 0.83 0.88 0.89 0.50 0.68 0.62 0.66 0.38 0.40 0.39 0.22 0.15 0.18 0.15 2.24 1.64 1.54 1.59 2.47 1.69 1.17 1.17 1.07 1.12 0.65 0.91 0.51 0.87 0.51 0.37 0.50 0.62 0.19 – 0.19 2.11 1.66 1.46 1.41 1.25 1.09 1.08 1.07 0.85 0.71 0.58 0.58 0.52 0.49 0.45 0.39 0.29 0.29 0.23 0.22 0.12 16% 14% 12% 10% average of four journals 8% BSC 6% 4% 2% 0% No Lag 1 2 Year Year lag Lag 3 4 Year Year Lag Lag 5 6 Year Year Lag Lag 7 Year lag 8 Year lag 9 Year lag 10 Year lag Fig. 5 Distribution of citations over time. The distribution of citations as a percentage of total citations during the first 10 years after publication for articles published in the four economics, finance, and banking journals listed in Fig. 2, and for BSC papers that were published in SSCI-listed journals J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 117 and Eqs. 1 and 3 above. The results are displayed in Table 8, and indicate that the rank ordering of the journals is very robust to different citation windows. Although only a very small percentage of citations occur during the first 2 years after publication, this 2-year window appears to be a very good predictor of the citations an article will receive in the following years. However, this rank order comparison is based on data at the journal-level, and we know (by casual empiricism) that there is substantial variation in citation counts across different articles published in the same journal. In the course of calculating the multi-year JIFs in our above analysis (e.g., Table 8), we found that we were not able to exactly replicate the 2-year off-the-shelf JIFs using the raw SSCI citation data—in fact, our “hand-calculated” JIFs were nearly always lower than the published off-the-shelf versions. Thus, as a double-check we use both off-the-shelf JIFs and hand-calculated JIFs to construct the weighted JIF (equation 5) in the center columns of Table 9. Although the hand-calculated JIFs in column 3 generally yield lower average citation counts than the off-the shelf JIFs in column 2, the rank order of the journals is relatively unaffected by the different basis of calculation. Column 4 in Table 9 displays the journal specific CIF, from Eq. 4, which in most cases is larger than the weighted average JIFs in columns 2 and 3. This indicates that published BSC papers systematically receive more citations than the non-BSC papers that appear in the same field journals or general journals, and implies that the Bank Structure Conference either (a) imparts a reputational effect on these papers, or (b) gives these papers extra visibility prior to publication. Moreover, because we find this result systematically across both general journals and field journals of varying average quality, we can reject the notion Table 8 Direct conference impact factors for the Bank Structure Conference (Eq. 3), compared to journal impact factors for selected journals (Eq. 1). Twenty-five-year averages are displayed in cells, and all of the impact factors underlying these averages are based on either 2, 3, 4, or 5 years of citation data. The journals are ranked in order of the 2-year column, with the numbers in parentheses indicating those 2-year rank orderings Journal Journal of Financial Economics Journal of Economic Perspectives Review of Financial Studies American Economic Review Journal of Finance Journal of Accounting and Economics BSC (liberal) Journal of Monetary Economics Journal of Business Review of Economics and Statistics Journal of Financial Intermediation Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Journal of Money, Credit and Banking BSC (conservative) Real Estate Economics Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics Journal of Banking and Finance Financial Management Journal of Financial Services Research Journal of Financial Research Journal of Portfolio Management 2-year 2.11 1.66 1.46 1.41 1.25 1.09 1.08 1.07 0.85 0.71 0.58 0.58 0.52 0.49 0.45 0.39 0.29 0.29 0.23 0.22 0.12 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (11) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) 3-year 2.66 1.93 1.74 1.67 1.47 1.34 1.20 1.32 1.04 0.88 0.73 0.71 0.59 0.55 0.58 0.46 0.38 0.34 0.25 0.21 0.14 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (8) (7) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (15) (14) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) 4-year 2.99 2.10 1.88 1.83 1.57 1.50 1.23 1.49 1.14 0.98 0.78 0.78 0.64 0.56 0.63 0.51 0.44 0.36 0.24 0.22 0.15 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (8) (7) (9) (10) (11) (11) (13) (15) (14) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) 5-year 3.25 2.19 2.00 1.92 1.61 1.64 1.24 1.58 1.19 1.04 0.87 0.82 0.65 0.56 0.68 0.56 0.48 0.36 0.28 0.22 0.15 (1) (2) (3) (4) (6) (5) (8) (7) (9) (10) (11) (12) (14) (15) (13) (15) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) 118 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 Table 9 Journal-specific conference impact factors for the Bank Structure Conference (Eq. 4), compared to weighted-average journal impact factors for selected journals (Eq. 5), based on the full sample 1980–2005 data. All of the underlying impact factors are based on 2 years of citation data. The journals are ranked in order of column 2 Journal Journal of Financial Economics Journal of Finance Review of Financial Studies American Economic Review Journal of Monetary Economics Journal of Business Review of Economics and Statistics Journal of Money Credit and Banking Journal of Financial Intermediation Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Journal of Banking and Finance Journal of Financial Services Research Number of BSC papers published in journal, 1980– 2005. Journal Impact Factors Off-theshelf Handcalculated Conference Impact Factor for BSC 14 16 6 9 9 2 5 24 2.33 2.08 1.84 1.83 1.49 1.04 0.88 0.88 2.02 1.46 1.36 1.45 1.11 1.05 0.74 0.59 2.29 2.91 1.90 2.50 2.00 0.72 0.60 0.98 7 7 0.80 0.56 0.55 0.66 0.71 1.29 43 11 0.43 0.20 0.33 0.12 0.72 1.18 that the Bank Structure Conference program committee simply self-selects papers of higherthan-average quality for the Conference. 5 Conclusions In the wake of the US Supreme Court ruling in the 1963 Philadelphia National Bank case, US bank regulators had new antitrust enforcement requirements thrust upon them. To prepare for those new responsibilities, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago gathered research economists to discuss the current state of the literature on market structure and performance, the best ways to accurately define banking markets, and the microeconomics of financial markets more generally. At the conclusion of that initial 1963 meeting the organizers decided to meet again the following year. Those meetings continue to this day and are know as the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Conference on Bank Structure and Competition. In this study we provide a brief history of the Bank Structure Conference (BSC) and the topics considered. We show that most of the controversial issues in banking and financial regulation over the past four decades were critically evaluated at the Conference, typically years before the actual passage or enactment of legislative and regulatory reforms. Based on this observation alone, we can argue that the Conference has served to disseminate policyrelevant research on issues affecting the financial services industry, has been an effective forum for debating and influencing the important financial policy issues of the day, and in some instances has played a relatively direct role in influencing policy decisions. However, we recognize that such a conclusion is based on rather ‘soft’ information. As an alternative (and more quantitative) way to assess the impact of the Conference, we develop a variety of absolute and relative “impact factors” based on citation data from the J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 119 Social Science Citation Index, and we use these tools to gauge the impact that the Conference has had on the scholarly literature in banking and finance. Impact factors are a common tool used to compare the relative quality of academic journals and academic departments—we augment and extend this tool to measure the quality of an academic conference. Our innovations are not BSC-specific; indeed, we hope that the “conference impact factors” that we develop here will be used by other researchers to measure the impact of other academic conferences. To control for the fact that not all conference papers get published, or are published in journals not included in the Social Science Citation Index, we calculate both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ measures of the impact of the papers presented at the BSC. We use these impact factors to illustrate how the impact of the Conference has changed over time; to compare the general quality of the BSC research programs to the general quality of the research found in leading economics, finance, and banking journals; and more specifically compare the impact of BSC research papers to non-BSC research papers after controlling for the quality of the journals in which these papers are eventually published. We find that the citation counts for the published versions of Conference research presentations have increased significantly through time, and that they are substantially higher than the citation counts garnered by the average article in the leading journals. 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