摘要：When both economies of scale and scope are simultaneously observed, merger tends to reduce costs. Numerous empirical studies have already established that beyond a certain size, banks’ costs tend to become proportional, thus establishing a limit to economies of scale and scope. We verify if the important merger process of Desjardins and Acadian credit unions started in 1998 pushed them beyond the more efficient scale size. An initial analysis, using exponential smoothing, show that the average operating cost stops decreasing when the asset reaches 250 million Canadian dollars. A more formal analysis, using a Data envelopment analysis model is applied to the data set. Our empirical approach applies the method proposed by Fortin & Leclerc (2006) to decompose economies of scope into scale efficiency and a measure of the convexity of the production function. The search for optimal size does not seem to be the first concern in the decision to merge.
