The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks’ efficiency and profitability has … and cost efficiency. We suggest a new matching strategy to control for the selection effects arising from the fact that … positive effect on cost efficiency. Comparing our results with those obtained from a naive performance comparison of merging …

efficiency (CE). We categorise mergers a success that fulfill simultaneously two criteria. First, merged institutes must exhibit … year above efficiency changes of non-merging banks. We employ this taxonomy to characterise (successful) mergers in terms …