Conflitos de agência nas cooperativas de crédito brasileiras

Abstract

The demand for financial services by credit unions has increased significantly in Brazil. This would have resulted primarily from the fact that these cooperatives practice rates on loans below those prevailing in the market and also higher rates of return on deposits invested. However, the organizational characteristics of a credit union determine a distribution of powers and interests that generates specific agency conflicts highlighting conflicts among borrower members and saver members; among members and management, and among credit unions and central credit unions which are affiliated. To check the influence of these conflicts on the performance of credit unions proxies were created from characteristics that determine which group dominates the credit union. In the case of the first mentioned conflict, the statistical methods used to create the proxies are cluster analysis and factor analysis. In other conflicts, the proxies are generated from responses to structured questionnaires. Then multiple regressions are done using five dependent variables (financial indicators) and five independent variables: the three calculated proxies, the type of the credit union (with or without common bond type) and cooperative system to which it belongs. For this, we used as a sample credit unions affiliated to SICOOB and SICREDI cooperative credit systems with higher net worth at R$ 10 million and that take deposits. The proxies of agency conflicts among borrower members and saver members and among members and management were statistically significant at 5% in relation to several indicators, showing the importance of these conflicts on the financial performance of credit unions studied. The agency conflict among credit unions and central credit unions which are affiliated was not important, which was attributed to multicollinearity with other variables used in the models.