Based on an unbalanced panel of all Bavarian cooperative banks for the years of 1989-95 which includes information on 243 mergers, we analyze motives for and cost effects of small-scale mergers in German banking. Estimating a frontier cost function with a timevariable stochastic efficiency term...

Cooperation among savings and cooperative banks was criticized by the European Commission because of potentially anti-competitive effects. In an industrial economics model of banks taking deposits and giving loans we look at regional demarcation as one of such cooperative practices. There are...