Objective and data usage

The objective of this website is to give researchers access to deposit betas for U.S. banks. Deposit betas measure the sensitivity of a bank's deposit cost to changes in the short-term interest rate. For example, a deposit beta of 0.4 means that a bank raises its average deposit rate by 40 bps for a 100 bps increase in the short-term interest rate.

Data usage

The deposit beta was introduced to the academic literature in a series of papers by Drechsler, Savov, and Schnabl. If you use the data, we ask you to cite the papers on which this work was based:

-- Drechsler, Itamar, Alexi Savov, and Philipp Schnabl. "Banking on Deposits: Maturity Transformation without Interest Rate Risk." Journal of Finance (2021). Paper
-- Drechsler, Itamar, Alexi Savov, and Philipp Schnabl. "The Deposits Channel of Monetary Policy" The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2017). Paper

Other work analyzing deposit betas:
-- Drechsler, Itamar, Alexi Savov, and Philipp Schnabl. "How Monetary Policy Shaped the Housing Boom" Journal of Financial Economics (2022). Paper
-- Supera, Dominik. "Running out of Running Out of Time (Deposits): Falling Interest Rates and the Decline of Business Lending, Investment and Firm Creation,", working paper (2023): Paper

Methodology and sample

The estimation follows the methodology in Drechsler, Savov, and Schnabl (2021). The sample covers all commercial banks with at least 40 quarterly observations in the years 1984 to 2022. The deposit beta is estimated using domestic deposit expenses scaled by domestic deposits. The expense beta is estimated using total interest expenses scaled by total assets.

Interpreting deposit betas

1. We estimate each bank's deposit beta using all available data from 1984 to 2022. We therefore think of these betas as the average historical deposit beta. Banks' deposit betas may change over time and we may add different estimation periods in the future.

2. Banks offer many different deposit products (e.g., checking, savings, time deposits). As we have shown in our academic work, deposit betas vary by product. To provide a bank-level perspective on the cost of bank financing, we estimate separate betas for total domestic deposit expenses (deposit beta) and total interest expenses (interest expense beta). We may add betas for other subcategories later.

Data and Variables

The data is available in STATA (download STATA File) and Excel (download Excel File).

1. Bank name: name
2. Bank call report identifier: rssdid
3. Bank FDIC identifier: cert
4. Percentile rank average assets: rankpctile
5. Average inflation-adjusted assets (in thousands): asset_cpi
6. Assets (in thousands) in Q4 2022 (if in business): asset_2022q4
7. Deposit beta: depexpbeta
8. Interest expense beta: expbeta

Updates and Feedback

If you have questions, please send an email to Bam Charoenwong at cc7771@stern.nyu.edu.