This paper investigates the size-efficiency relation of European cooperative banks during the 2006-2015 period. We … cooperative banks from 12 European countries. This work extends the existing literature by focusing on shape of size-efficiency … European cooperative banks are significantly more cost efficient than their bigger peers and that the size-efficiency relation …

function with a timevariable stochastic efficiency term we show that positive scale and scope effects from a merger arise only … taken over by others are less efficient than the average bank in the same size class, but exhibit on average the same … efficiency as the acquiring firms. For the post-merger phase, our empirical results provide no evidence for efficiency gains from …