“…A number of papers have analysed small credit institutions focusing on performance (Goddard et al, 2008a;Kontolaimou and Tsekouras, 2010), diversification (Goddard et al, 2008b;Lepetit et al, 2008;Mercieca et al, 2007, Mckillop andWilson, 2011), risk of failure (Fiordelisi and Mare, 2013) and ownership structure (Gorton and Schmid, 1999 (Hesse and Cihák, 2007;Ayadi et al, 2010) providing empirical evidence that cooperative banks are more stable than commercial banks as they have a great deal of soft information (which is hard to collect) on the creditworthiness of members/customers, and therefore less likely to make lending mistakes. Furthermore, size appears to be positively related to systemic risk (Vallascas and Keasey, 2012;De Jonghe, 2010) and the majority of cooperative banks are small rural credit institutions.…”