Using data collected by the authors on the largest and most durable of worker-owned firms in U.S. manufacturing, this paper is addressed to two questions. First, are the responses of cooperatives to changes in their economic environment different from those of conventional firms? It appears that cooperatives are more inclined to adjust pay than employment. Second, how profitable has membership in the cooperatives been? Using information on share prices, the authors find membership to have been extremely profitable and, in this sense, the prices of co-ops' shares have been underpriced. The riskiness of cooperative memberships is discussed.

Empirical research on the effect of bank competition on bank risk has so far produced very inconclusive results. In this paper we revisit this long-standing debate and propose a new empirical approach that is concentrated on the relationship between deposit market competition and bank risk. This approach closely follows the traditional theoretical views of the competition and risk relationship and is focused on testing the classical moral hazard problem of the bank: deposit market competition raises the optimal risk choice of the bank by raising the costs of bank liabilities. Since banks can substitute between retail and wholesale funding, we relate deposit market competition to wholesale market conditions and examine their joint effect on the risk of bank assets. The analysis is based on a unique, comprehensive dataset, which combines retail deposit rate data with data on bank characteristics and data on local deposit market features for a sample of 589 US banks. Our results support the notion of a risk-enhancing effect of deposit market competition.

In this paper, we focus on the interconnectedness of banks and the price they pay for liquidity. We assess how the concentration of credit relationships and the position of a bank in the network topology of the system influence the bank’s ability to meet liquidity demand. We use quarterly data of bilateral interbank credit exposure among all German banks from 2000 to 2008 to measure interbank relationships and network characteristics. We match these data with bids placed by individual banks in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) weekly repo auctions. The bids measure each bank’s willingness to pay for liquidity, since they had variable rate tenders with a “pay-your-bid” price. Controlling for bank characteristics and the daily fulfillment of reserve requirements, we find that banks with a more diversified borrowing structure in the interbank market bid significantly less aggressively and pay a lower price for liquidity in the ECB’s main refinancing operations. These findings suggest that incentives to diversify banks’ liquidity risk dominate the benefits of private information. When the network position of the bank is taken into account, we find that central lenders in the money market bid more aggressively in auctions.