Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

4-2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Eric Hughson

Rights Information

2026 Samson M Brown

Abstract

This paper examines whether the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 increased the likelihood that publicly traded U.S. financial firms exited public markets in the post-crisis period. Following the global financial crisis, Dodd-Frank introduced enhanced prudential supervision requirements, stress testing mandates, strengthened capital adequacy rules, and restrictions on proprietary trading activity that disproportionately affected larger and more complex financial institutions. These provisions generated systematic cross-sectional variation in regulatory exposure that can be used to evaluate whether increases in compliance burden influenced ownership structure decisions.

A firm-level panel dataset covering publicly listed financial institutions between 2006 and 2016 is constructed using Compustat accounting data and CRSP delisting outcomes. Exploiting variation in regulatory exposure combined with the timing of Dodd-Frank's enactment, the analysis implements a difference-in-differences framework comparing highly exposed firms to less exposed firms before and after 2010. Regulatory exposure is proxied using pre-policy balance-sheet characteristics including firm size, leverage, and capitalization, which capture variation in supervisory intensity under post-crisis regulation.

The results indicate that weakly capitalized institutions became more likely to exit public markets following the reform, while broadly defined exposure measures yield limited evidence of a uniform regulatory effect. These findings suggest that post-crisis capital adequacy tightening played an important role in shaping ownership structure decisions within the financial sector and contribute to the growing literature on the long-run decline of publicly traded firms in the United States.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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