Quando il bue dice cornuto all'asino..ovvero la riforma delle banche popolari

This paper summarizes some criticisms against the recent Italian reform that imposed that the largest cooperative banks must to be transformed in limited companies. The main are: better governance and business model of the mutual ownership, cooperative banks’ positive impact on system stability and their importance/resilience worldwide. It deepens the discussion, by analysing financial data of Italian banks from Mediobanca-R&S dataset and showing that limited company model is not better than cooperative one in terms of performance and risk; therefore, the 2015 reform doesn’t seem to be justified by the past empirical evidence.