THE DETERMINANTS OF OUTREACH PERFORMANCE OF SOCIAL BUSINESS: AN INQUIRY ON ITALIAN SOCIAL COOPERATIVES

We analyze factors affecting outreach performance of a large sample of (type A) social cooperatives in Italy taking into account their heterogeneity with a multi-output stochastic distance function frontier. We find that cooperative age, innovation leading to new products/customer segments, managerial turnover, target programming and shareholder variety are positively and significantly (while shareholder meetings, the number of volunteers and of contracts negatively and significantly) correlated with outreach performance, measured as the capacity of serving more beneficiaries given labour and capital inputs. Outreach is also significantly and positively affected by local GDP and human capital.