We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers....

Cooperative owners have a transactional relationship - as customers or input suppliers - with their firm in addition to their investment relationship. This changes both the incentives and the information that owners have to monitor managerial performance. We argue that this difference reduces...