Bank competition and concentration: do credit unions matter?

One interesting aspect of the financial services industry is that for-profit institutions, such as commercial banks, compete directly with not-for-profit financial intermediaries, such as credit unions. In this article, William R. Emmons and Frank A. Schmid analyze the competition between banks and credit unions. Using annual county-level data on banking-market concentration and household participation rates at occupational credit unions for the period between 1989 and 1996, the authors find empirical evidence of two-way competitive interactions between banks and credit unions.