Did the JOBS Act Benefit Community Banks? A Regression Discontinuity Study

This study examines the effect of section 601(a)(2) of the Jumpstart Our Small Business (JOBS) Act of 2012, which modified the threshold for unlisted banks and bank holding companies (BHCs) to deregister under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 from 300 to 1,200 shareholders of record. This change in the cutoff permits utilizing the quasi-experimental technique of regression discontinuity to identify the causal effect of Exchange Act deregistration on the performance of banks and BHCs that took advantage of the statutory change. Using an original dataset consisting of 187 community banks and a novel application of comparative interrupted time series analysis to regression discontinuity, I estimate the local average treatment effect of deregistration on compliers.