Damping Systemic Risk. The Role of Cooperative Banks

This chapter focuses on the countercyclical potentialities linked to the bank’s relational businessmodel.We prove that cooperative banks are less involved in themechanisms underlying systemic risk, thus verifying that their presence somehow contributes to mitigating this risk’s spread in a financial system. Referring to a group of Italian banks, an innovative methodological approach is proposed, with relative empirical implementation, based on some variables—available for all banks— considered in the literature as proxies of the systemic risk propagation speed and capacity and the banks’ health managerial status.