This paper analyzes how French cooperative banking groups adapted their organization, status and model to develop and grow, until the current financial crisis. It explores how they benefitted from evolutions in cooperative law that lowered financing constraints and increased the scope of their activities, becoming large banking groups, and identifies how these groups tried to develop a model of governance, characterized by internal control, which was partly dedicated to the members, but biased more and more towards the top of the organizational pyramid and to stockholders (the new stakeholders coming from the existence of listed vehicles). While the developing business model for cooperative banks appeared to confer a comparative advantage and was synonymous with efficiency before the financial crisis, it seems that the hybridization of the cooperative model has also been a source of conflict of interest, weakness in strategy and an incentive to increase risk. The third part of the article examines how French cooperative banking groups have been hurt by the recent crisis and whether different organizational and strategic features or choices may explain different levels of resilience to financial turmoil. Eficiencia e hibridación en los bancos cooperativos. El caso francésEste artículo analiza la forma en que los bancos cooperativos franceses han modificado su estatuto, su estructura organizativa y su modelo, para desarrollarse, hasta la reciente crisis financiera. Se pone de manifiesto, entre otras cosas, como esta banca ha sabido aprovechar la evolución del derecho cooperativo para disminuir sus restricciones de financiación, extender y diversificar su campo de actividad, llegando a convertirse *
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.
The 2008 financial crisis affected both cooperative and joint-stock banking groups. But since these groups had adopted different forms and modes of governance, cooperative banks might have suffered less. Cooperative banking groups are seen as more risk-averse than jointstock banking groups. One possible explanation is that they are owned by their members and unlisted; another reason could be the extent of their presence in a local area, which enables them to reduce information asymmetry. Joint-stock banking groups are seen as more ready to take risks. As they are held by stockholders requiring high-returns, they are more motivated to undertake risky projects. As cooperative banking groups have evolved, some have adopted joint-stock banking group features. This evolution can have more important consequences on their management style. To study whether cooperative banking groups faced the financial crisis better than jointstock groups, we compared their sensibility to the financial crisis and their contribution to financial stability. We built a sample composed of European cooperative and joint-stock banks and computed a z-score indicator, reflecting the probability of bankruptcy. A dummy variable set for the governance criteria distinguishes between the different types of cooperative banking groups. We used a data panel treatment to highlight the potential differences due to governance factors over the entire period studied (2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011); we then divided this period into three sub-periods to determine whether some banks, according to the extent of hybridization, showed on the one hand more resistance, and on the other more resilience. Our principal conclusion is that cooperative banking groups that have retained the main features of their original model while diversifying their activities have contributed most to financial stability.
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