Efficient concatenation of DFAs?
Yes - it is known that there exist DFA's of $m$ and $n$ states, respectively, such that the minimal DFA for the concatenation of the corresponding languages has $m*2^n - 2^{n-1}$ states, which matches the known upper bound.

This was first observed by Maslov in 1970, and rediscovered by Yu, Zhuang, and K. Salomaa in their paper, "The state complexities of some basic operations on regular languages", TCS 125 (1994), 315-328.