Luis G. Dopico

• PhD in economics
• Chief Economist at CUCollaborate

https://www.cucollaborate.com/credit-union-resources/board-composition-research This report quantifies credit union board of directors' size and gender and minority representation as well as explores links between board structure and key measures of credit union member-centric and financial performance during 2012-2021. Our key findings are (1) t...

https://www.cuinsight.com/credit-unions-shares-and-dividends-the-roots-of-the-industrys-distinctive-terminology/

https://www.cuinsight.com/the-two-main-drivers-of-credit-union-asset-growth-high-interest-rates-on-deposits-and-marketing-expenses/

https://www.cuinsight.com/how-to-comprehensively-measure-your-credit-unions-performance/

https://filene.org/learn-something/reports/overdraft-protection-programs-credit-union-best-practices Overdraft protection (ODP) programs have become a reliable source of noninterest income for many credit unions, especially small institutions. But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession, many credit unions are eliminating or restructuri...

https://www.cuinsight.com/credit-unions-provide-their-members-and-communities-with-large-and-growing-benefits/

https://filene.org/learn-something/reports/technology-infrastructure-and-cybersecurity-self-assessment-tools-for-credit-unions This brief summarizes a survey on credit unions’ technology infrastructure and cybersecurity readiness and presents a prototype self-assessment tool that credit unions can take to begin identifying risks and opportunities...

https://filene.org/learn-something/reports/credit-union-asset-growth-long-term-trends-and-projections-for-the-covid-19-crisis During the last five decades, periods of rising unemployment have coincided with periods of marked increases in credit union asset growth. The countercyclical nature of credit union asset growth highlights that financial co...

Essays in Economic and Business History https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/20/363 From their beginnings in 1908, credit unions have differed from banks. One fundamental difference was that share accounts in credit unions, unlike bank deposits, were not debt. Credit unions could delay and discount payments. Thus, during the...

This report identifies the number and assets of small, midsize, largish, and very large Canadian credit unions, and compares their performance across key income and balance statement entries, as well as merger-adjusted growth. We also explore how performance varies nor only across asset size ranges, but also within each of them. We compare the perf...

https://filene.org/learn-something/reports/factors-contributing-to-failures-of-credit-unions-and-banks-1980-2018 Since federal insurance for credit union shares was launched in 1971, 3,192 credit unions and 1,977 banks have failed, resulting in losses worth $3.1 billion (B) to the National Credit Union Insurance Fund (NCUSIF) and $154B to the Fede...

https://filene.org/learn-something/reports/488 In this second report of a three-part series on improving the credit union member experience (MX), we explore the effectiveness of three strategies: making use of MX data, focusing to better fit member compatibility, and providing operational transparency. By member compatibility, we mean: narrowing th...

Cooperative Business Journal. This article abridges and updates Dopico (2016) showing that credit unions provide substantial member benefits to their members, with loan interest rates that, on average, were lower than banks by 0.62% and deposit interest rates that were higher than banks' by 0.51% during 1985-2018. These sustained benefits have resu...

This report for the Filene Research Institute and the Canadian Credit Union Association quantifies the size, role, and economic impacts of Canadian credit unions during 2000-2018, reporting in particular their number of members, also compared to population, their assets, also compared to GDP and chartered banks' assets, the incomes credit unions pr...

A preliminary review suggests that credit unions whose websites showcase the credit union difference (e.g., member ownership, cooperative governance, community focus, etc.) perform substantially better for their members across a variety of measures., including more consumer-friendly interest rates, broader ranges of products offered, asset growth,...

This report compares corporate, foundation, and credit union managers' responses to a survey about their institutions' capacities for vigilance "seeing sooner" and adaptiveness "acting faster" and presents recommendations about how credit unions may achieve those goals.

This report (1) introduces open-book management (OBM) to credit unions, (2) measures the extent of interest in, and application of, OBM among credit unions, and (3) explores whether credit unions with more interest in OBM, or that apply OBM more, already perform better for their members. Three key elements in OBM include: (1) managers sharing clea...

More than 5.6 million New Yorkers have chosen a credit union as their financial partner. That's because credit unions are on the same side as consumers, helping to support working families by providing over $1 billion in benefits every year. Credit unions use a traditional banking model, but profits go back to members (not to institutional sharehol...

This report evaluates which among 100+ factors could be reliably linked with asset growth across credit unions, and across asset sizes, during 1979-2016. Key factors include offering attractive interest rates, ROA, product breadth, and marketing. The report also explores the complex relationships among asset size, noninterest expenses per assets (c...

This case study presents the recent efforts by Conexus, a large (C$7 billion) credit union in Saskatchewan, Canada to shift from incremental innovation to transformational innovation. Applying the concepts of ambidexterity, Conexus was considering: (1) developing new units to focus on the explore function, (2) massively simplifying its procedures a...

Community development financial institution (CDFI) banks and credit unions provide much needed capital in areas underserved by conventional financial institutions. Targeting low-income and other underserved communities, they often take on what appear to be riskier loans, yet their portfolio performance is on par or better than conventional financia...

This report explores ambidexterity as a means to structure businesses for innovation. Structural ambidexterity involves creating separate units focusing on exploring new products and services, and others focusing on the business's mature products and services. Contextual ambidexterity involves creating multiple autonomous units each of which can ch...

This report reviews key trends in credit unions’ financial sustainability, including for instance interest rates and market share. The report also introduces a “two-speed limits” framework. Under this framework to remain financially sustainable, credit unions’ assets must: 1. Grow faster than the 5-year moving average of GDP, thus ensuring that cr...

This study documents how much the share of credit union assets held in mortgages rose in recent decades. This study also estimates the size of the connections between mortgage share and several measures of performance at individual credit unions. Our estimates suggest that macroeconomic and real estate market conditions have large effects on perfor...

The history of conversions of mutual thrifts to stock thrifts provides important perspectives on more recent credit union conversions. From the middle 1970s to the early 1990s, undercapitalized mutual thrifts used conversions to raise capital. Since then, however, converting thrifts typically already had considerable capital and economic value, whi...

Mergers tend to improve credit union cost efficiency. When the acquirer is much larger than the target credit union, target members benefit in terms of lower loan rates and higher deposit rates, while acquirer members see little change. When merger partners are more equal in size, these benefits are shared more evenly. Over time, credit union merge...

Founded in 1974, American Share Insurance (ASI) is an insurer for deposits in credit unions and it is the sole surviving private primary deposit insurer in the US. We assess reasons why ASI survived when numerous other deposit insurance systems did not. These reasons include ASI’s policy of insuring only credit unions, its geographic diversificatio...

This paper presents the “fastfashion” model, its historical development, and its prospects. Fast fashion departs from traditional norms of designer-led fashion seasons, using instead designers who adapt their creations to customer demands on an ongoing basis. From its origins in Galicia, Spain, in the 1960s fast fashion changed the fashion industry...

Many countries around the world have experienced banking crises in the past two decades, and all countries are witnessing substantial changes in the structure and nature of banking. These developments have led national and multilateral policymakers to focus increased attention on the crucial role of banking supervision. One key issue, on which the...

Using new data from the World Bank and OCC surveys, we show correlations across a wide range of countries between foreign banking and domestic economic, financial and bank regulatory conditions. Foreign banking tended to be more prevalent in countries that were more open to foreign ownership of their banks, more open to banks’ engaging in a wider r...

Two central questions about the structure of bank supervision are whether central banks should supervise banks and whether to have multiple supervisors. We use data for 70 countries across developed, emerging and transition economies to estimate statistical connections between banking performance, the structure of bank supervision, permissible bank...