-2003 period, we assess the effect of bank size on technical efficiency and its two components: pure technical and scale … inefficiency is mainly due to pure technical inefficiency for all size of banks except the largest banks for which we found high … equivalent in terms of overall technical efficiency for banks of all size classes except for those of the smallest size. However …

Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size …-specific and connected to government guarantees. Furthermore, as banks grow in relative size, tail risks are shifted to debtholders …