monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings banks increase with their specialization on certain industry sectors … cooperative banks. In the second part we measure the overall effect of better monitoring and the associated higher sectoral credit … impact of higher credit concentrations in the case of the cooperative banks. For savings banks, the results on the net effect …

cooperative banks' performance depending on their commitment to relationship lending. First, we find no evidence of a risk …-taking channel of monetary policy for consolidated cooperative banks. Further, the profitability of relationship-based cooperative … banks is more severely hit in a low interest rate environment than that of consolidated cooperative banks. This raises …