Co-operative Banks and Financial Stability

The paper analyzes whether co-operative banks are less involved than others in the mechanisms underlying the propagation and accentuation of systemic risk and therefore, if their presence, like a bearing, somehow manages to mitigate the final entity of this risk. We observe a set of Euro Area banks in 2018 with the aim of dividing them into homogeneous groups based on the values assumed by some indicators linked to systemic risk. It emerges that co-operative banks are more numerous in the groups in which the indicators show that the probability of contributing to systemic risk is lower. In literature, there are few studies on this particular topic and, to the best of our knowledge, none of them uses the procedure we propose.