This study undertakes a modeling based performance assessment of all Irish credit unions between 2002 and 2010, a particularly turbulent period in their history. The analysis explicitly addresses the current challenges faced by credit unions in that the modeling approach used rewards credit...

This study examines the relative performance of Japanese cooperative banks between 1998 and 2009, explicitly modeling non-performing loans as an undesirable output. Three key findings emerge. First, the sector is characterized by increasing returns to scale which supports the ongoing...

The study examines the technical, scale and size efficiency of acute hospitals in Northern Ireland over the six-year period, 1986-1992. The efficiency estimates are used to investigate whether the empirical evidence supports the subsequent current rationalisation policy for hospital provision in...

The low-income credit union modelled in this paper is an institution with a particular form of contract designed to allow it to operate among agents that are excluded from using banks. Specifically credit unions deal with those potentially on the minimum income guarantee. The challenge facing...

This study examines the distributional properties of futures prices for contracts traded on LIFFE. A filtering process is employed to remove day of the week and holiday effects, a maturity effect, moving average effects and the influence of an asset's conditional variance from the raw returns...

This study investigates the factors driving the development of the UK equity release market. The results of a thematic review of semi-structured interviews with industry stakeholders (comprising senior representatives of product providers, advice providers and regulators) suggest that the...

We estimate a structural profit model for 956 matched pairs of US credit unions and commercial banks, using the results to examine how the subsidies associated with credit unions' income tax exemptions and non-profit status are allocated across various stakeholders. We find economically large...

In 2009 there were over 49,330 credit unions across 98 countries with more than 184 million members and approximately $1,354 billion in assets. There is a great diversity within the credit union movement across these countries. This reflects the various economic, historic and cultural contexts...

This study examines the firm size distribution of US financial institutions. A truncated lognormal distribution describes the size distribution, measured using assets data, of a large population of small, community-based commercial banks. The size distribution of a smaller but increasingly...