When Google can’t help you

I hope to save you many hours of senseless toil with this brief post on where to download FDIC’s bank Deposit Market Share data. These public data show the total dollar amount deposited at each bank within U.S. metropolitan areas.

Things that work

If you want to download a bulk zipped version of CSV data (I am not aware of any other options) for every metropolitan area in the U.S. for a particular year, then you have to use the (modified) link below. The exact link will download 2017 data but if you want 2015 or any other available year then simply change the 2017 in the link below to the desired year.

http://www5.fdic.gov/sod/ShowFileWithStats1.asp?strFileName=all_2017.zip

As a side note, if the link doesn’t seem to work, make sure you set the browser to allow downloads from this domain.

Where does that link come from?

The US government’s data catalog website has the 2017 file readily available here. They post the direct download link there so a bit of experimentation let me realize that changing the year in the link allows one to download other years. In this manner, I downloaded years 2008, 2014-2018.

Things that don’t (quite) work

I am mentioning the resources below because they are some of the tops ones to pop up if you search for FDIC Deposit data or something similar.

You can try using FDIC’s datatools to get Summary of Deposits or Deposit Market Share data but acquiring data for the entire US in this manner is prone to both error and tremendous hassle.

You can download 1987-1993 Deposit Data here but if you won’t be able to get anything from this century.

Why did I need these data?

I was trying to recreate Michael Reher’s and Pedro Gete’s Financial Studies paper on Mortgage Supply and Housing Rents so I can use their instrument in my work. They use the Big 4 banks’ share of deposits within a metropolitan area to instrument mortgage denial rates.