St. Louis Fed study on customer migration to credit unions

In this article, authors William R. Emmons and Frank A. Schmid analyze competition among banks and between banks and credit unions using a dynamic model of spatial competition.

The model allows for the co-existence of (for-profit) banks and (not-for-profit) credit unions. Using annual county-level data on banking market concentration and credit-union participation rates for the period 1989-96, Mr. Emmons and Mr. Schmid said they found empirical evidence of two-way competitive interactions between banks and credit unions.

The full text of the article, Banks Versus Credit Unions: Dynamic Competition in Local Markets, can be found at the St. Louis Fed's Web site. The article is in PDF format and requires Acrobat Reader software from Adobe.