Roles of Outside Directors in Cooperative Financial Institutions

As the governance of financial institutions is becoming an important issue, there are many papers empirically investigating the governance issues of banks, which are stock companies. However, cooperative structured financial institutions (co-ops), which have a unique governance structure different from stock companies, play a substantial role in the Japanese banking markets, and, therefore, it is worth examining whether some governance scheme developed for stock companies are effective at cooperative financial institutions. Our results showed that the presence of outside directors at co-ops (“Shinkin Banks”) contributes to an improvement in efficiency.