The Regional Distribution of Bank Closings in the United States: An Extension of the Amos Analysis

This study investigates factors that influenced interstate differentials in bank closing rates in the U.S. over the 1982-1992 time period. The estimation reveals that the bank failure rate is a decreasing function of the average mortgage portfolio yield, the capital requirement, the real price of imported crude oil, and the percentage growth rate of gross state product and an increasing function of the cost of deposits, the real ceiling level of federal deposit insurance, and the volatility of gross state product.