Bank Structure Conference Impact Study Douglas D. Evanoff & Philip F. Bartholomew & Robert DeYoung & Cosmin Lucaci & Ronnie J. Phillips Published online: 19 June 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 Abstract The first Conference on Bank Structure and Competition was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 1963. Since that time, the Conference has served to stimulate and disseminate policy relevant research on issues affecting the financial services industry and as a forum for debating the relevant policy issues of the day. We evaluate the impact of the Conference on public policy and the banking and finance literature. We provide a qualitative argument that the Conference has helped promote policy change by showing that major financial reforms were typically discussed years earlier at the Conference. We then analyze data from the Social Science Citation Index and find that the Conference has had a strong and systematic impact on the banking and finance literature. Keywords Banking . Financial structure . Bank regulation . Impact study JEL Classification G20 . G28 J Finan Serv Res (2008) 34:99–121 DOI 10.1007/s10693-008-0037-4 D. D. Evanoff (*) Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: devanoff@frbchi.org P. F. Bartholomew International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: pbartholomew@imf.org R. DeYoung University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA e-mail: rdeyoung@ku.edu C. Lucaci Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: clucaci@gmail.com R. J. Phillips Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA e-mail: rphillip@lamar.colostate.edu