Are European cooperative banks more responsible?

The objective of this paper is to establish a comparison between European cooperative banks and non-cooperative banks in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). One of the main limitations of existing studies is their inability to measure and verify the concrete application of the banks' speeches and communications in their actual practices. To remedy this problem, we try in this study to, first, evaluate the banks’ communication, and in a second step, measure the implication of the European banking sector in CSR practices. We also think that it is interesting to see the impact of the recent financial crisis on the practices of banks in terms of CSR. For this, we will consider the years 2008 and 2015. Our data are collected, for the most part, from the annual reports of banks. We have also exported some data from Fitch Connect database. Globally, banks are becoming more transparent. They provide more information in 2015 compared to 2008. Taking into account all the criteria selected, cooperative banks are better rated on average. However, some differences emerge depending on the type of information analyzed (their communications or practices), hence the importance of analyzing the practice of banks to judge their CSR, something that is not done yet in the literature.