Background

Allen N. Berger is H. Montague Osteen, Jr., Professor in Banking and Finance in the Finance Department, Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina since 2008. He is also Carolina Distinguished Professor, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Financial Institutions at the Darla Moore School of Business. Professor Berger was 2022 President and Conference Program Chair of the Financial Intermediation Research Society (FIRS), presiding over its annual conference in Budapest, Hungary. He is also Senior Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, and is affiliated with other research centers around the world. He is on the editorial boards of eight research journals, former editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, co-editor of eight special issues of four different journals, co-organizer of numerous research conferences at universities and central banks, and advisor for Ph.D. students in multiple departments at South Carolina and universities in various other countries.

He has 131 publications in refereed research journals, at least one in each of the 36 of the 37 years from 1987 to 2023, including 12 lead articles (4 competitive, 8 in special issues), and those in top finance journals, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of Corporate Finance; top economics journals, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Journal of Money, Credit and Banking; and other top professional business journals, Management Science, Journal of Business, and European Journal of Operational Research. He is the most prolific contributor to some of these journals.

Professor Berger is co-author of three full-length research books, The Economic and Financial Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis Around the World: Expect the Unexpected (2023), TARP and other Bank Bailouts and Bail-Ins around the World: Connecting Wall Street, Main Street, and the Financial System (2020), and Bank Liquidity Creation and Financial Crises (2016). He is also co-editor of all four editions of the Oxford Handbook of Banking, 2010, 2015, 2019, and 2024, and has about 40 other research publications, such as book chapters and conference proceedings.

Professor Berger ranks fifth on Research.com list of Top Economics and Finance Scientists with an H-Index of 136 as of December 6th, 2021. He has over 97,000 Google Scholar citations, including 31 articles with over 1,000 citations each, and an additional 20 exceeding 500 each. He has given keynote addresses on five continents, been visiting scholar at Federal Reserve Banks and central banks of other nations, and has presented the most papers in a number of different research conference series. He also won a number of best paper awards from research journals and conferences, and been officially recognized for both research and teaching at the University of South Carolina.

His most personally prized accomplishments are his parts in the successes of his students, interns, research assistants, and co-authors, whose joint accomplishments greatly exceed his own. Some have earned their own endowed chairs, full professorships, a major journal editorship, Federal Reserve Bank President, chair of a major Finance department, head of a research department, and other major personal successes. He hopes that many more are on their way to such levels.

Past accomplishments include Economist, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 1982-2008; Ph.D. in Economics, University of California, Berkeley. 1983; and B.A. in Economics, Northwestern University, 1976.

Liquidity creation data (DopBox)
This dataset includes the dollar amounts of liquidity created by virtually every bank in the U.S. from 1984: Q1-2016: Q4 (quarterly data) calculated using seven liquidity creation measures:

1. The preferred liquidity creation measure (“cat fat”)
2. On-balance sheet liquidity creation (“cat nonfat”)
3. Asset-side liquidity creation
4. Liability-side liquidity creation
5. Off-balance sheet liquidity creation ("fat")
6. Takedown probability-adjusted “cat fat” liquidity creation
7. Securitization-adjusted “cat fat” liquidity creation.

The dataset also includes these amounts normalized by total assets, each bank’s identifier (RSSD9001), name, a few common measures of bank size (gross total assets, total assets, deposits, and gross loans), and location (city and state). Amounts are expressed in real 2016 dollars using the implicit GDP price deflator. (Gross total assets and total assets are also included in nominal terms for ease of use.)

The methodology to construct liquidity creation data is explained in:
Berger, Allen N. and Christa H.S. Bouwman, 2009. “Bank Liquidity Creation,” Review of Financial Studies 22, 3779-3837.

• Please cite this paper (available on the research tab at the top of this webpage) when using these data.

SOD data (DropBox)
The data file contains the Summary of Deposits data that precedes the data found on the website of FDIC. The data include bank and branch-level variables (e.g., identifiers, names, addresses, counties, MSAs, and deposits) and bank-level variables (e.g., number of offices, charter, high holder, and insurer).

Additional information can be found at the links below:

• Data on bank liquidity creation based on the concept originated in:
  Berger, Allen N. and Christa H.S. Bouwman, 2009. “Bank Liquidity Creation,” Review of Financial Studies 22, 3779-3837.
• Data on bank liquidity hoarding based on the concept originated in:
  Berger, Allen N., Omrane Guedhami, Hugh H. Kim, and Xinming Li, Forthcoming, “Economic Policy Uncertainty and Bank Liquidity Hoarding,” Journal of Financial Intermediation.

Research 

His research covers a variety of topics related to financial institutions.

Education

• Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1983
• M.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1979
• B.A., Northwestern University, 1976