Credit unions vs. commercial banks,who takes more risk?

A unique feature of the financial services industry is that both shareholder-owned banks and member-owned credit unions coexist and compete against each other. In this study, we investigate two research questions. First, we compare risk-taking by banks and credit unions, with an additional consideration as to how regulatory oversight (state or federal) relates to such risk-taking. Second, we examine how competition affects the difference in risk-taking between these two types of financial institutions. To answer both questions, we rely on a matched sample (by loan type, size, and county) of commercial banks and credit unions, covering the period between 2010 and 2017. We use three empirical proxies for risk-taking, the Z-score, measuring an institution’s insolvency risk, as well as the ratios of non-performing loans to total loans and loan charge-offs to total loans, measuring the credit risk. Our results suggest that banks tend to engage in more risk-taking than credit unions; however, state regulatory oversight reduces the risk-taking gap, especially in terms of the Z-score. We further find that competition induces different risk-taking behaviors in banks and credit unions. Our results are robust to several alternative specifications.     

Coinsurance effect and bank lines of credit

The coinsurance effect hypothesis predicts that firm diversification reduces financial constraints through imperfectly correlated cash flows among segments. We empirically test the hypothesis by studying the relation between coinsurance effect and bank lines of credit. We find that coinsurance effect is associated with a higher availability of bank lines of credit, and that diversified firms hold a higher level of bank lines of credit if they have higher investment opportunities and if they are bank-dependent. We find that diversified firms hold a higher fraction of corporate liquidity in the form of bank lines of credit due to the coinsurance effect. The findings are consistent with the coinsurance effect hypothesis and contribute to the debate on the value consequence of firm diversification by disclosing a specific channel through which firm diversification affects financial constraints.     

The changing fortunes of FHA's Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund and the legislative response

The 1980s was a bad decade for FHA's Mutual Mortgage Insurance (MMI) program, the mainstay of FHA's single family mortgage insurance. While the MMI Fund is required by statute to be actuarially sound, the Fund lost close to $6 billion dollars, and its economic value declined from 5.3 percent of insurance in-force to under one percent. This study documents the decline in the soundness of the MMI Fund in the 1980s and describes the legislation enacted in October 1990 to shore up the Fund.     

保险资金运用新规的历史跨越

2009年颁布了新《保险法》,随后《保险资金运用管理暂行办法》、《保险资金投资股权暂行办法》、《保险资金投资不动产暂行办法》等一系列保险资金运用的规定相继出台。新规的实施给保险资金运用提供了更广阔的渠道,比如不动产、未上市企业股权,以及基础设施债权计划等。新形势下,保险资金运用在拥有重大机遇的同时,也面临严峻的挑战。回...     

A case of constitutional apples and oranges: a functional comparison of pension priority and benefit guarantees in U.S., U.K. and Canadian insolvency and pension law regimes

Canada's insolvency law reform increased the priority granted to employer‐sponsored pension claims. The article compares the treatment of such claims in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. A comparison of the legislative provisions concerning pension funding shortfalls from contribution arrears or economic underperformance in relation to the assumptions used for investment income or liability valuations finds that insolvency law has been used to address contribution arrears, but risks from economic underperformance have been addressed by pension benefit insurance. Post‐insolvency priority for contribution arrears provides appropriate incentives to discourage pre‐insolvency preferences for payments to other creditors, while shortfalls from economic underperformance do not involve issues of preference between creditors. The absence of any insolvency rationale for changing priority for shortfalls from economic underperformance and the likely disparity between the assets available to satisfy clams and the much larger amounts of such shortfalls makes the use of insolvency law to address this risk much less effective than insurance. Canada, however, has not adopted the insurance policy instrument used in the U.S. and U.K. to mitigate the impact of pension funding shortfalls. The constitutional inability of Canada to legislate in respect of matters of pension regulation that would allow it to control the well‐known insurance problems of moral hazard and adverse selection may explain why it has only chosen to adopt an insolvency policy instrument. However, a change in priorities in insolvency may generate incentives for secured creditors that either undermine or reinforce this policy choice. Secured creditors could attempt to circumvent the new priority scheme through private arrangements with the debtor or to increase their monitoring activities to ensure the debtor is current in its pension contributions. Secured creditors choices will be influenced by the bankruptcy courts' interpretation of the preference provisions in the insolvency legislation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The market for private student loans: an analysis of credit union exposure,risk, and returns

Beginning in 2011, credit unions in the United States have been required to report in their quarterly call reports their holdings of private student loans. Since this time, private student loans have been the fastest growing loan product among credit unions. The empirical results here indicate credit unions respond to external market forces and internal exposure to interest rate risk in their decision to hold private student loans. The effect of which, to date, has led to lower returns on their assets and no effect on overall risk. Credit unions looking to diversify their loan portfolio should do so with caution. Private student loans being in deferral reduce both delinquency and charge-off rates, which will rise over time with their seasoning and as interest rates rise.     

How do sovereign credit rating changes affect private investment?

Sovereign credit rating changes have an influence on real private investment of re-rated countries. We find significant increases in private investment growth following upgrades in sovereign ratings. These increases, however, are transitory. We also find significant, temporary declines in private investment growth following sovereign rating downgrades. The results hold after accounting for re-rated countries’ growth opportunities, endogeneity, and other factors that could affect private investment. The irreversible nature of investment may be the explanation for the temporary changes in the growth rates of physical capital investment associated with revisions in sovereign credit ratings.     

The evolution of cost-productivity and efficiency among US credit unions

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 investigate changes in the efficiency and productivity of US credit unions during 1989–2006 by benchmarking the performance of individual firms against an estimated order-α quantile lying “near” the efficient frontier. We construct a cost analog of the Malmquist productivity index, which we decompose to estimate changes in cost and scale efficiency, and changes in technology. We find that cost-productivity fell on average across all credit unions but especially among smaller credit unions. Smaller credit unions confronted a shift in technology that increased the minimum cost required to produce given amounts of output. All but the largest credit unions also became less scale efficient over time.     

美国保险公司破产研究及对我国的启示

保险公司的破产会给保单持有人、股东以及保险保障基金等造成很大的损失。鉴于国内相关案例和数据的缺乏,本文主要参考美国的文献和数据,分析了1978年～2009年美国保险公司破产案例,研究发现虽然保险公司破产的触发事件主要是损失准备金不足、非充分定价、公司业务的快速增长、子公司破产和投资失败等,但导致保险公司破产的根本原因却...     

Analysing the determinants of insolvency risk for general insurance firms in the UK

This paper estimates a reduced-form model to assess the insolvency risk of General Insurance (GI) firms in the UK. In comparison to earlier studies, it uses a much larger sample including 30 years of data for 515 firms, and also considers a much wider set of possible determinants of insolvency risk. The empirical results suggest that macroeconomic and firm-specific factors both play important roles. Other key findings are the following: insolvency risk varies across firms depending on their business lines; there is default clustering in the GI industry; different reinsurance levels also affect the insolvency risk of insurance firms. The implications of these findings for regulators of GI firms under the newly launched Solvency II are discussed.     

Investigating the cost performance of UK credit unions using radial and non-radial efficiency measures

This paper examines the relative efficiency of UK credit unions. Radial and non-radial measures of input cost efficiency plus associated scale efficiency measures are computed for a selection of input output specifications. Both measures highlighted that UK credit unions have considerable scope for efficiency gains. It was mooted that the documented high levels of inefficiency may be indicative of the fact that credit unions, based on clearly defined and non-overlapping common bonds, are not in competition with each other for market share. Credit unions were also highlighted as suffering from a considerable degree of scale inefficiency with the majority of scale inefficient credit unions subject to decreasing returns to scale. The latter aspect highlights that the UK Government's goal of larger credit unions must be accompanied by greater regulatory freedom if inefficiency is to be avoided. One of the advantages of computing non-radial measures is that an insight into potential over- or under-expenditure on specific inputs can be obtained through a comparison of the non-radial measure of efficiency with the associated radial measure. Two interesting findings emerged, the first that UK credit unions over-spend on dividend payments and the second that they under-spend on labour costs.     

Consumer Credit and Over‐indebtedness in China

Over the past three decades, China has experienced a significant increase in consumer credit. There are many causes for this growth and expansion in credit availability, such as deregulation of consumer credit markets. The expansion of consumer credit leads to the climbing of consumers' over‐indebtedness. Traditional remedies provided to consumers are limited to minor restrictions on attachment of the debtor's property. No statute has been passed in China to rearrange consumer insolvency. Moral hazard and debtor fraud are the two particularly salient concerns that hinder the adoption of consumer insolvency legislation in China. This paper makes use of publicly available data collected on government websites and bank websites to empirically describe the development of consumer credit and consumers' indebtedness in China and also theoretically examines the treatment of over‐indebtedness and the obstacles encountered in the adoption of consumer insolvency legislation. Based on these investigations, the paper suggests that although there are some obstacles, it is necessary and feasible to construct consumer insolvency system in China. Copyright © 2018 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Funding corporate rescue: the Impact of the financial crisis

Insolvency reform across many jurisdictions over the last twenty years has focused on the development of legislation to facilitate business reorganizations. However, any regime which involves rescue requires a degree of support from the commercial environment. The rescue regimes may therefore be severely tested in situations where there is a general economic downturn such as the world has experienced in the last two years. This article evaluates empirically the perceived impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the opportunities for rescue on the basis of a survey we set out among insolvency professionals worldwide. Most of the 562 respondents to the survey from 56 jurisdictions agree that the credit crisis of 2007 stifled the access of distressed business to financial facilities so needed for successful restructuring. It retrenched the access to financial facilities and thus impacted negatively the prospects for preventing or even ending the bankruptcy procedure with reorganization instead of winding up of the estate assets. Several reasons that have been pointed out by the insolvency professionals in our survey are discussed in this article. We conclude that somewhat paradoxically just when rescue is needed the most, the practical reality may be that businesses will not be saved if there is insufficient support available either by way of additional credit or because other (funding) creditors are so financially stressed themselves that they are unable or unwilling to support any potential rescue. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Board characteristics and credit‐union performance

We examine the role of board characteristics on the performance of Australian credit unions during the period 2004–2012. Credit unions are unique as they are member‐owned institutions, and their directors are democratically elected by their members – an unusual governance structure that poses challenges for board effectiveness. We find that board remuneration, board expertise and attendance at meetings are associated with increased credit‐union performance and are consistent with the goal of maximising member benefits. While the unique features of credit unions limit the presence of external monitoring mechanisms, we provide evidence that these board characteristics are relevant for credit unions.     

Ethics <Emphasis Type="Italic">versus</Emphasis> Ethos in US and UK Megabanking

Company law in the US and UK fails to acknowledge that authorities’ propensity to rescue giant banks from the consequences of insolvency creates an implicit contract that assigns taxpayers a coerced and badly structured equity stake in too-big-to-fail institutions. The entrenched managerial norm of maximizing stockholder value abuses this stake. It does so by lending an undeserved moral legitimacy to efforts by TBTF managers to take on dangerous levels of tail risk because their bank’s deep downside is effectively eliminated by the prospect of unlimited taxpayer support. Conventional tools of prudential regulation constrain but do not de-legitimate this behavior. To accomplish that end, this paper calls for: (1) a formal recognition of the fiduciary duties and dividends that TBTF firms owe to taxpayers and (2) criminalizing aggressive pursuit of safety-net subsidies as a form of public endangerment.     

Examining the disclosures on the websites of English credit unions

This paper examines the disclosures made on English credit unions’ websites. Credit unions without a website are presumed to be small. Community credit unions with websites tend to offer basic services with a limited range of products that may appeal to poorer members of society. Occupational credit unions appear more likely to have a greater range of products.     

The diversification and financial performance of US credit unions

For US credit unions, revenue from non-interest sources has increased significantly in recent years. We investigate the impact of revenue diversification on financial performance for the period 1993–2004. The impact of a change in strategy that alters the share of non-interest income is decomposed into a direct exposure effect, reflecting the difference between interest and non-interest bearing activities, and an indirect exposure effect which reflects the effect of the institution’s own degree of diversification. On both risk-adjusted and unadjusted returns measures, a positive direct exposure effect is outweighed by a negative indirect exposure effect for all but the largest credit unions. This may imply that similar diversification strategies are not appropriate for large and small credit unions. Small credit unions should eschew diversification and continue to operate as simple savings and loan institutions, while large credit unions should be encouraged to exploit new product opportunities around their core expertise.     

The growth of US credit unions

The growth of US credit unions during the 1990s is investigated empirically, using univariate and multivariate cross sectional and panel estimation techniques. Univariate tests of the law of proportionate effect suggest that in general large credit unions grew faster than their smaller counterparts. On average credit unions with above-average growth in one period tended to experience below-average growth in the next. Smaller credit unions tended to have more variable growth than large ones. While credit unions share a common co-operative philosophy, they differ in terms of age profile, scope for membership growth, charter type and financial structure and performance. In estimations of a multivariate growth model, most of these characteristics are found to have a significant influence on the size-growth relationship. While large state chartered credit unions grew faster than their smaller counterparts, the reverse was true for federally chartered credit unions. In general, if larger credit unions grew faster than smaller ones, they tended to do so for specific reasons: because their charters were less restrictive, because they were more efficient, or because they had a financial structure that was more conducive to growth. Therefore credit union growth was not ‘random', but highly systematic.     

自然人破产制度的建立

从法政策角度考量,自然人破产制度可以使债权人获得公平受偿,使债务人获得重生,这是自然人破产制度确立的最重要原因;而信贷消费的迅速发展,是我国确立自然人破产制度的社会基础。我国面临的城乡二元结构、信用体系的不健全只是建立自然人破产时必须予以考虑的法技术问题。在建立自然人破产制度时必须正视城乡二元结构、信用体制缺失等问题,并逐步建立自然人财产申报登记制度,完善信用制度。     

Resolution of incentive conflicts in the mortgage industry

This paper analyzes the contractual response to incentive divergencies in the housing-finance sector of the economy. Emphasis is placed on the role played by the private mortgage insurance master policy in stemming the moral hazard of lenders. The structure of the coinsurance feature of the policy is shown to induce the lender to lessen foreclosure costs. Cases are identified where the inducements of coinsurance are not complete. This incompleteness explains the role of the time constraints and bidding instructions imposed on the lender by the master policy.The paper also considers the effects that securitization is having on the incentives of the players in housing finance. The decoupling of the lender from the investor role is lessening the effectiveness of coinsurance, thereby creating new agency costs. Responses such as increased explicit monitoring and the use of reputational bonding are noted and the expected future direction of the contractual structure is discussed.