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Efficient or Fortunate? The Impact of Environmental Economic Conditions on Co-Operative Banks

This paper analyses the cost and profit efficiency of Italian co-operative banks. These small financial institutions have homogeneous business model and their performance is strongly influenced by the economic conditions of their local markets. As recognised by various recent studies (Bos et al., 2008), the efficiency measurement has to account for the heterogeneity of environmental conditions. By using a sample of 2683 year observations collected between 2000 and 2005, we estimated cost and profit efficiency using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis and including various environmental variables accounting for disparities among Italian regions. Our results provide evidence that banks in the North-East of Italy are more cost efficient, taking advantage of a favourable environment, while banks in the South of Italy display a higher profit efficiency, probably due to lower competitive pressures.