Sean Dowsing

This paper looks at what characteristics of banks in the 1930s increased their probability of receiving a federal bailout loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and what dictated the size of that loan. Studying the past bailout plans helps shed light on current economic recovery efforts such as the TARP plan. This paper is unique because it studies the role politics played in one specific facet of Roosevelt’s New Deal plan as opposed to studying the plan as a whole. This paper uses dataset which consists of all the banks in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Michigan for the years 1932 and 1933; the data has county and bank level statistics. This study finds evidence that there was some political bias in the distribution and size of the RFC’s loans.

Senior Thesis