I am grateful to John Duca at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas for highlighting a recent NBER paper that he co-authored with Michael Bordo and Christoffer Koch.
The authors find that “policy uncertainty significantly slows U.S. bank credit growth, consistent with it having an effect on broad loan supply and demand.”
These results corroborate our findings in recent years evaluating the performance of CFS Divisia monetary aggregates.
Bordo, Duca, and Koch also did fine work quantifying the regulatory and reporting burden on banks since Dodd-Frank (see Figure 2 on page 26). In fact, their data stretch back to 1960. For instance, the number of pages per regulatory filing for banks was less than 10 from 1960 into the early 1980s, gradually advancing to roughly 50 prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, the pages per filing are near 90 and advancing at a seemingly geometric rate.
The paper is available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w22021.