1. What happened to the employment in the US commercial banking since 1980? Over the last forty years, there has been an extraordinary decline in the number of US commercial banks: from 14,400 they were reduced to 4,400. This reduction seems to be associated with some important changes in the structure of employment which unfortunately have not received due attention from the media and/or scholarly contributions. The scope of this research project is to conduct an empirical investigation of the long-term changes in commercial banking employment, to understand their main causes, and to provide policy recommendations for the future of banking employment