As the governance of financial institutions is becoming an important issue, there are many papers empirically investigating the governance issues of banks, which are stock companies. However, cooperative structured financial institutions (co-ops), which have a unique governance structure...

Due to the traditional operational model of cooperative banks which is mostly based on financial intermediation, the range of a local bank’s social influence in a given environment is highly dependent on the money transfer balance, that is using local money to satisfy local needs. A typical...

The aim of the study is to establish and analyze the relationship between expenditure on corporate philanthropy and fi nancial performance of cooperative banks in Poland. The study covered 70 cooperative banks, where the level of expenditure on social activities was above the average in the...

Motivated by the recent discussion of the declining importance of deposits as banks' major source of funding we investigate which factors determine funding costs at local banks. Using a panel data set of more than 800 German local savings and cooperative banks for the period from 1998 to 2004 we...

Do private banks act as hard-nosed bankers when firms get financially distressed compared to public banks that have the mandate to support regional economy? For German firms in the period 2000-2005, I find that the probability of leaving the market after financial distress is higher for firms...

Cooperation among savings and cooperative banks was criticized by the European Commission because of potentially anti-competitive effects. In an industrial economics model of banks taking deposits and giving loans we look at regional demarcation as one of such cooperative practices. There are...

Microfinance is typically associated with joint liability of group members. However, a large part of microfinance institutions rather offers individual instead of group loans. We analyze the incentive mechanisms in both individual and group contracts. Moreover, we show that microfinance...

Microfinance is typically associated with joint liability of group members. However, a large part of microfinance institutions rather offers individual instead of group loans. We analyze the incentive mechanisms in both individual and group contracts. Moreover, we show that microfinance...

Lending specialization on certain industry sectors can have opposing effects on monitoring (including screening) abilities and on the sectoral concentration risk of a credit portfolio. In this paper, we examine in the first part if monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings...