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 …

operating efficiency is actually not statistically significantly different than that of comparable sized commercial banks …

function with a timevariable stochastic efficiency term we show that positive scale and scope effects from a merger arise only … efficiency as the acquiring firms. For the post-merger phase, our empirical results provide no evidence for efficiency gains from …

means of a stochastic frontier approach, then we try to explain the estimated BCCs' cost efficiency with a set of merger … Cooperativo, BCCs) and try to assess whether those mergers were efficiency-enhancing. For the purpose, we employ a two …-step procedure: we first estimate bank-level cost efficiency scores for a large sample of Italian banks in the period 1993-2013 by …