Is there a single frontier in a single European banking market?

This paper attempts to estimate comparable efficiency scores for european banks operating in the single market in the eu. Using a data set of more than 5000 large commercial banks from all major european banking markets over the period 1993–2004, the application of meta-frontiers enables us to assess the existence of a single and integrated european banking market. We find evidence in favor of a single european banking market characterized by cost and profit meta-frontiers. However, compared to the meta-frontier estimations, pooled frontier estimations tend to underestimate efficiency levels and correlate poorly with country-specific frontier efficiency ranks.