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 …

are regulated, including the need to obtain a charter to operate and explicit and implicit federal guarantees of bank … liabilities to reduce the probability of bank runs. These aspects of banking affect a bankś choice of risk vs. expected return …, which, in turn, affects bank performance. Banks have an incentive to reduce risk to protect the valuable charter from …