This book investigates the merits of a diverse banking system with a special focus on the performance and role of cooperative banks in seven European countries where they are prominent (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain). The theoretical and empirical arguments...

Financial services actively contribute to the economic development of the society. This leads to a social safety net that protects the people from economic shocks. Hence, each and every individual should be provided with affordable institutional financial products/services, which is popularly...

Previous attempts to understand the functioning of cooperative banks have often considered them as being similar to credit unions. However, we argue that credit unions are only a subset of cooperative financial institutions and the models used to describe their behavior cannot be generalized to...

This edited volume showcases how the European cooperative banks have continued to evolve amid a new competitive scenario that resulted from the Global Financial Crisis started in Europe in 2008. The cooperative banking paradigm has been put under an unprecedented pressure as a consequence of...