Does bank consolidation lead to efficiency gains? Evidence from large commercial banks in Europe and US

This article aims at investigating the efficiency of European and US commercial banks. Scale and scope economies indicators, as well as a measurement of X-efficiency are derived from three cost functions: Fourier flexible form, translog and Box-Cox. This allows checking the stability and the robustness of the evidence across the different specifications. Our results over the period 1995-98 show that, overall, the largest banks do not seem to have higher efficiency scores. Therefore, further enlargement of the production size does not necessarily lead to production gains.