Are Credit Unions Too Small?

Are Credit Unions Too Small?

U.S. credit unions serve 93 million members, hold 10 percent of U.S. savings deposits, and make 13.2 percent of all non-revolving consumer loans. Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600 percent. We use a non-parametric local-linear estimator to estimate...

The Future of Credit Unions

Are Credit Spreads Too Low or Too High? - A Hybrid Barrier Option Approach

Based on the works of Brockman and Turtle (2003) and Giesecke (2004), we proposed in this study a hybrid barrier option model with corporate capital gains tax which is free of problems within the structural model in explaining observed credit spreads. Our approach does not predict credit spreads that are too low for investment grade corporate bonds; neither does it predict credit spreads that a...

Evaluating the performance of US credit unions

Credit unions are small, cooperative, not-for-profit institutions, which distinguishes them from other financial intermediaries. In this study we conduct a performance evaluation of credit unions. The criteria respect the unique organizational and institutional features of credit unions, without losing sight of the fact that they must compete with other financial intermediaries. We use nonparam...

US Credit Unions: Survival, Consolidation and Growth

This paper uses hazard function estimations together with cross-sectional growth regressions to examine the impact of exit through merger and acquisition (M&A) or failure, and internally-generated growth, on the firm-size distribution of US credit unions. Consolidation through M&A was the principal cause of a reduction in the number of credit unions, but impact on concentration was small. A pos...