Cooperative versus conventional (jointstock) banking in Europe: comparative resistance and resilience during the recent financial crisis

During the banking crisis of the 1990s, French cooperative banks emerged as more resistant and efficient than joint-stock banks, which enabled them to improve their market share and increase their reserve capital. This subsequently became the keystone of the external restructuring that led to the transformation of cooperative banks into large universal banking groups. At the time, their competitive advantage relied mainly on a different approach to risk-taking, which was associated with their cooperative legal form and their specific governance model. However, the same features have clearly not prevailed during the financial phase of the most recent crisis. Whereas governance models in the banking sector have been deeply questioned, the original cooperative model has evolved differently within European countries, with a high level of hybridization in some and a very diffuse cooperative network in others. Some European cooperative groups have been damaged by the crisis, mainly because of the corporate and investment banking that formed part of their activity. Yet the recent crisis has revealed the importance of a resistant and resilient worldwide banking system and the diversity of legal forms and organizations could contribute to achieving this goal. In this paper, we assess the resistance and resilience of major joint-stock banks during the crisis and compare them to cooperative banks in different European countries and Canada. We conduct our analysis at an aggregated/consolidated level for these two categories of banks. Using different indicators (e.g., z-score, loans to the economy, return on equity) as dependent variables, we verify whether the cooperative form is synonymous with greater resistance or resilience, and whether the results may be explained by different organizational schemes in cooperative banking.