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Workers' cooperatives: a feasible alternative for addressing societal crises?

COOPALT
Recent economic and social crises provide an opportunity to empirically analyze the resilience of worker cooperatives. Cooperatives are generally recognized as having a major role in sustainable development. These organizations seem to promote local development and community stability, particularly important in times of recession. Various case studies have shown how cooperatives tend to be more resilient to economic crises than for-profit businesses, and they tend to behave in more counter-cyclical ways. However, only a few large-scale quantitative studies have been conducted on the subject, and often these have taken the form of aggregate descriptive comparisons. This research project intends to conduct a rigorous comparative study using econometric survival analysis models. It will attempt to test theoretical explanations by focusing on the European context and, in particular, on SCOPs (sociétés coopératives).