Going forward financially: credit unions as an alternative to commercial banks

Mark Klinedinst

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The global financial meltdown brought to light a number of weaknesses in the U.S. financial system. Not all financial institution types will be taking large sums of taxpayer money to address their crippling decisions. Credit unions in the U.S. represent a type of financial cooperative that will probably not take any taxpayer money directly due to their structure and prudential oversight. Commercial banks, especially the megabanks, are likely to see even more bailouts in the future unless structural weaknesses are addressed in the clarifications as part of the enforcement of the Dodd-Frank Act. Using a unique panel data set on U.S. commercial banks, thrifts and credit unions from 1994 through 2010 (over 300,000 observations) performance metrics on a number of dimensions point to strengths and weaknesses of the various financial institutional forms. Credit unions also have had far fewer adjustable rate mortgages and mortgage backed securities as a percent of their portfolio. Robust estimators to correct for potential endogeneity are used to analyze the ROA differentials between different institutional forms and portfolios. When controlling for size, region and portfolios credit unions are often estimated to have a better ROA. Institutions of under 50 million dollars, about 50 percent of the total sample, show credit unions having higher efficiency in that they control more assets per dollar spent on salaries than commercial and savings banks.

Keywords: credit unions; banks; cooperative; defaults; net charge-offs; return on assets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G14 G21 L21 P00 P13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04-13, Revised 2012-04-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/38194/1/MPRA_paper_38194.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:38194

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().