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...

This study examines how consolidation activity in the credit union system may impact small business lending. Drawing on Canadian provincial-level data over the period 1992-2009, it provides systematic evidence which suggests that the size of credit unions has a statistically significant negative...

Advances in information-processing technology have eroded the advantages of small scale and proximity to customers that traditionally enabled small lenders to thrive. Nonetheless, the membership and market share of US credit unions have increased, though their average size has also risen. We...

As part of the tremendous development experienced by microfinance over the last few years, one type of institution has not generated all the attention that it could :credit unions. This can be explained by the frequent corporate governance weaknesses of this type of institution, which have been...

It is known that sunspots can trigger panic-based bank runs and that the optimal banking contract can tolerate panic-based runs. The existing literature assumes that these sunspots are based on a publicly observed extrinsic randomizing device. In this paper, I extend the analysis of panic-based...

Traditional models of bank runs do not allow for herding effects, because in these models withdrawal decisions are assumed to be made simultaneously. I extend the banking model to allow a depositor to choose his withdrawal time. When he withdraws depends on his liquidity type (patient or...

This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting empirical results in the literature concerning the relation between loan risk and collateral. Specifically, we posit that different economic characteristics or types of collateral pledges may be associated with the empirical dominance...

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

In this paper we show that the equilibrium in the Stiglitz-Weiss model (Stiglitz and Weiss, 1981) is a two-interest rate equilibrium. For this we use the true return-function for banks shown by Arnold (2005), the assumption of Bertrand competition and make a consideration for a discrete number...