Are cooperatives associated with more resilient financial architectures? Evidence from Spanish agricultural firms

Abstract

This study examines whether cooperative organization is associated with a distinct financial resilience profile among agricultural firms. Financial resilience is conceptualized as the combination of ex-ante buffering capacity (liquidity and working-capital slack, together with the operating flow that replenishes these buffers) and ex-post downside exposure (the realized incidence of accounting losses). Drawing on the literature on cooperative governance, organizational purpose and financial flexibility, the paper argues that cooperatives should not be evaluated only through average profitability, because their organizational logic may be more visible in liquidity preservation, working-capital slack and downside-risk exposure. Using firm-level panel data on Spanish agricultural firms for 2014–2024, the study compares cooperatives with investor-owned firms through models with province and year fixed effects, firm-level controls and several robustness checks based on stricter sample comparability, propensity-score weighting and balanced-panel restrictions. The results show no robust cooperative differential in return on assets. However, cooperative firms exhibit higher cash intensity, greater working-capital slack, stronger EBITDA-based operating performance in several specifications and a lower probability of reporting losses. These findings suggest that the cooperative form is associated less with systematically higher mean returns than with a more protective short-term financial architecture. The paper contributes to research on cooperation-based organizations by documenting that organizational form is systematically associated with the way firms structure financial buffers and limit downside exposure. It also extends cooperative performance research by shifting attention from profitability comparisons to resilience-oriented accounting outcomes.