Abstracts of Papers Presented at the Annual Meeting

This paper examines the causes of the distress experienced by the Dutch cooperative banking sector during the early 1920s. It uses a newly created bank-level data set constructed from the business archives of the Dutch cooperative movement’s present-day successor institutions and the Dutch central bank. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the cooperative sector, the Netherlands in the 1920s presents a natural experiment setting in which to determine the institutional attributes that best ensure success in the face of a large common exogenous price shock. This paper seeks to explain why the most successful cooperatives appear to have been those that exclusively serviced rural agricultural customers, had more unlimited liability structures, were members of a cooperative network with national coverage, and were less aligned to a single socioreligious group.