Productivity as a concept in both manufacturing as well as service industries is a function of inputs and outputs. Banking is a service industry with its product in the form of services. Where a firm's final output consists of some quantitative commodity, the concept of productivity in relation...

Cooperative banks are small and their survival is not guaranteed by the "Too Big To Fail" policy so that their default can be concrete in time of crises. We analyze the contribution of efficiency to cooperative bank probability of default. We estimate several measures of bank efficiency...

This study examines the relative performance of Japanese cooperative banks between 1998 and 2009, explicitly modeling non-performing loans as an undesirable output. Three key findings emerge. First, the sector is characterized by increasing returns to scale which supports the ongoing...

Contrary to expectations, the continuous decline in money market interest rates between 2009 and 2014, and the following negative era for European interbank markets, has positively affected profitability of Finnish cooperative banks. We obtain these results that contrast sharply with previous...

Since the 1990s financial sector regulation in Australia has treated credit unions and building societies the same as banks under the designated title of authorized depository institutions. This allows credit unions to choose between different organizational structures: cooperative; convert to...

Non Performing Assets (NPA) is an indicator of the health, performance and credit risk of the bank. The cooperative sector has been facing serious problem of raising Non Performing Assets growth has a direct impact on profitability of banks. It is necessary to trim down the NPAs to improve the...

In this paper we study the intense wave of mergers among Italian mutual cooperative banks (Banche di Credito Cooperativo, BCCs) and try to assess whether those mergers were efficiency-enhancing. For the purpose, we employ a two-step procedure: we first estimate bank-level cost efficiency scores...

Previous studies of risk management and overconfidence at firms and financial institutions suggest that female CEOs engage in more conservative risk management practices relative to male CEOs, and less aggressive growth and acquisition behavior. However, these studies are limited by a lack of...

This paper which is mainly based on the primary research carried out for one of the author's PhD thesis. It examines the case of an organisation that has positioned itself in the marketplace as both ethical as well as ideologically green. The Co-operative Bank's ethical and green policies are...