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.本研究考察2012年《小企业创业扶持法案》（Jumpstart Our Small Business (JOBS) Act）第601(a)(2)条的政策效应——该条款将未上市银行与银行控股公司（Bank Holding Companies，BHCs）依据1934年《证券交易法》（Securities Exchange Act of 1934）注销注册的记名股东门槛，从300名上调至1200名。这一门槛调整使得研究得以运用断点回归（Regression Discontinuity，RD）这一准实验方法，识别出利用该法定变更的银行与BHCs，其因《证券交易法》注销注册所产生的经营绩效因果效应。本研究使用涵盖187家社区银行的原创数据集，并将比较中断时间序列分析创新性地应用于断点回归框架，以此估计注销注册对依从者的局部平均处理效应（Local Average Treatment Effect，LATE）。