In this paper, to begin with, we define soft information as qualitative, subjective information produced by banks through the establishment of long-term lending relationships. We then highlight the importance of soft information for cooperative and social banks in the screening, pricing and...

Nicht der Wind, die Segel bestimmen den Kurs.(Michael Fuchs, deutscher Außenhandelspräsident) Diese Worte machen deutlich, dass nicht der Wind beeinflussbar ist, sondernlediglich die Segel das Mittel sind, um vorwärts zu kommen, wenn der Wind abflaut oder sich ein Sturm über das Schiff...

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...

Given the in-built risks relating to leverage, liquidity, and fiduciary liability in banking, apartfrom tightly regulating the banks, many the jurisdictions have also put in place depositguarantee schemes for bank customers. However, a deposit guarantee scheme provides a restricted coverage, and...

Based on an unbalanced panel of all Bavarian cooperative banks for the years of 1989-95 which includes information on 243 mergers, we analyze motives for and cost effects of small-scale mergers in German banking. Estimating a frontier cost function with a timevariable stochastic efficiency term...

Our aim is to empirically assess differences in behaviour and performance of European cooperative and commercial banks in a low interest rate environment. We employ dynamic panel data methods to assess the relative performance of both ownership structures based on a data set of nearly 1,000...

The structural diversity of the German banking market and the associated variety of business models is thought to have been an important factor in the stability of the German banking market in recent decades. This diversity is manifested both in the three-pillar structure of the German banking...

The contribution of institutionally diversified financial sectors to more sustainable growth and financial stability-in particular the role of effective local banking structures—is not always fully appreciated, whether in the context of development cooperation or in policy discussions in the...

A comparison of the German banking system with that of the United Kingdom (UK) and Spain shows Germany to be decentralised not only regarding the distribution of banks, but also its financial and political system more generally. Decentralised banks, which are predominantly regional savings banks...