About this project

The Supervisory Compass is a book and a measurement record. The book is a fourteen-chapter narrative history of US bank supervision built around the Supervisory Priorities Index, a panel of OCC, Federal Reserve, and FDIC written records from 1863 to the present. The website is the place the panel can be queried, the book chapters can be sampled, and the teaching material can be downloaded.

Authors

Stephen A. Karolyi — principal investigator.
Andrew Bird — Chapman University.
Thomas Ruchti — Virginia Tech / Office of Financial Research.

Funding

Supported by the Searle Research Foundation and the Costello research fund. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of any affiliated institution.

Contact

For research collaboration, teaching adoption, or press inquiries: hello@supervisorycompass.org (forwarding to be configured at deploy time).

The site itself

Static site, built with Astro. The interactive explorer runs in your browser via DuckDB compiled to WebAssembly — no server is doing the work. The full source for the website lives in the project repository alongside the book and the data pipeline.

Privacy. This site sets no third-party cookies. We do not run analytics that track individual visitors. If we add traffic measurement, it will be a privacy-respecting tool with no personal data collected. The data downloads do not require an account.