To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership types. Efficiency measures are computed from stochastic frontiers and used in ownership and privatization regressions having dummy variables for bank type. Our empirical results support the hypotheses that foreign-owned banks are most efficient and governmentowned banks are least efficient. In addition, the importance of attracting a strategic foreign owner in the privatization process is confirmed. However, counter to the conjecture that foreign banks cream skim, we find that domestic banks have a local advantage in pursuing fee-forservice business. Finally, we show that both the method and the timing of privatization matter to efficiency; specifically, voucher privatization does not lead to increased efficiency and earlyprivatized banks are more efficient than later-privatized banks even though we find no evidence of a selection effect.
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Length: 32 pages Date of creation: 01 Apr 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:wdi:papers:2004-679
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Find related papers by JEL classification: P30 - Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - General P34 - Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - Finance P52 - Economic Systems - - Comparative Economic Systems - - - Comparative Studies of Particular Economies
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer, 2002.
"Government Ownership of Banks,"
Journal of Finance,
American Finance Association, vol. 57(1), pages 265-301, 02.
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Other versions:
La Porta, Rafael & Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio & Shleifer, Andrei, 2001.
"Government Ownership of Banks,"
Working Paper Series
rwp01-016, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
[Downloadable!]
Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopezde-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer, 2000.
"Government Ownership of Banks,"
NBER Working Papers
7620, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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