This study assesses the impact of the single market program (SMP) and the European monetary union (EMU) on the German banking sector. As in contrast to manufacturing or agriculture, many industries within the services sector could seal themselves off the competitors in foreign countries up to...

Based on an unbalanced panel of all Bavarian cooperative banks for the years of 1989-97 which includes information on 283 mergers, we analyze motives and cost effects of small-scale mergers in German banking. Estimating a frontier cost function with a time-variable stochastic efficiency term we...