What to Write About?
What to Write About?
I didn’t do a lot today so I don’t have too much to say.
No wait, I take that back. I did do a lot of work on my dissertation but I don’t have a lot of finished product to show for my efforts. I worked on what is called archival data research, primarily to measure how some large banks and some community banks fund loans to small businesses.
I hope that sounds impressive. If it does, I will really feel good then.
Archival data research consisted of slogging through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s data base going back to 1998. The data I was looking for was easy to find but I had to look at nine different annual reports to finish the archive work for each of the five largest California banks. Then, I had to load the data into an Excel spreadsheet that looks modestly nice. It was time consuming but everything flowed nicely for me. I’m comparing small business lending by large California banks and small California banks for part of the dissertation.
My next step after I completed the first spreadsheet for the five largest banks was to determine the number of small banks that were in existence prior to December 31, 1997. I had planned to use the sort function in the FDIC’s data base program that allows one to select certain criteria by date of the bank’s charter.
Sound simple, right?
Plug in the other parameters and push Find. Wait a minute or so while the data is extracted and then sent to my laptop.
Unfortunately for me, the date sort function was not working today. It would not give me a list of small California banks that began their operation before December 31, 1997. That meant I had to resort to a manual sort of all 214 banks in the small California bank list. I worked on that for most of the afternoon.
I still have about 64 more banks to check. This should go easily for me since they are all the smallest ones on the list and small banks, generally speaking or typing, are the newest ones that would be excluded from my final list. I think my list of older, small California banks will be around 100 or so.
I am not looking forward to the building a massive Excel spreadsheet for 100 banks that will run on for pages and pages. Granted, this would increase the size of the finished dissertation but I am not yet to the point of amassing volumes of information simply to thicken the size of the document. This is one of the topics for discussion with my Committee chair on Friday. I would prefer to use a random sample of 20 or 25 of the smaller banks because that would shrink the slogging through the data base that I would have to do and it should be a very representative sample of the group.
Let’s hope my Chair agrees with me.
Woman of the Moment
This is a good spot to put the Woman of the Moment. Mercedes Terrell is always a pleasant diversion for me.
Be well and stay happy. Tomorrow should be a better blog posting.
I didn’t do a lot today so I don’t have too much to say.
No wait, I take that back. I did do a lot of work on my dissertation but I don’t have a lot of finished product to show for my efforts. I worked on what is called archival data research, primarily to measure how some large banks and some community banks fund loans to small businesses.
I hope that sounds impressive. If it does, I will really feel good then.
Archival data research consisted of slogging through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s data base going back to 1998. The data I was looking for was easy to find but I had to look at nine different annual reports to finish the archive work for each of the five largest California banks. Then, I had to load the data into an Excel spreadsheet that looks modestly nice. It was time consuming but everything flowed nicely for me. I’m comparing small business lending by large California banks and small California banks for part of the dissertation.
My next step after I completed the first spreadsheet for the five largest banks was to determine the number of small banks that were in existence prior to December 31, 1997. I had planned to use the sort function in the FDIC’s data base program that allows one to select certain criteria by date of the bank’s charter.
Sound simple, right?
Plug in the other parameters and push Find. Wait a minute or so while the data is extracted and then sent to my laptop.
Unfortunately for me, the date sort function was not working today. It would not give me a list of small California banks that began their operation before December 31, 1997. That meant I had to resort to a manual sort of all 214 banks in the small California bank list. I worked on that for most of the afternoon.
I still have about 64 more banks to check. This should go easily for me since they are all the smallest ones on the list and small banks, generally speaking or typing, are the newest ones that would be excluded from my final list. I think my list of older, small California banks will be around 100 or so.
I am not looking forward to the building a massive Excel spreadsheet for 100 banks that will run on for pages and pages. Granted, this would increase the size of the finished dissertation but I am not yet to the point of amassing volumes of information simply to thicken the size of the document. This is one of the topics for discussion with my Committee chair on Friday. I would prefer to use a random sample of 20 or 25 of the smaller banks because that would shrink the slogging through the data base that I would have to do and it should be a very representative sample of the group.
Let’s hope my Chair agrees with me.
Woman of the Moment
This is a good spot to put the Woman of the Moment. Mercedes Terrell is always a pleasant diversion for me.
Be well and stay happy. Tomorrow should be a better blog posting.
posted by Chuck Reinhardt at 5:04 PM
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