Efficiency of the Bulgarian Banks in the Twenties of Last Century: Historical Reconstruction by means of Nontraditional Methods of Efficiency Measurement

This paper studies the dynamics of bank efficiency in Bulgaria for two different years in the last century, in particular 1923 and 1928, related to the financial stabilization and financial crisis respectively. In so doing several inter-dependencies has been detected related mainly with the reaction of different type of banks to the financial crisis and financial stabilization. The bank efficiency is measured by using nontraditional method for the measurement of bank efficiency – non-parametric method “Data envelopment analysis” (DEA) and parametric method "stochastic frontier analysis" (SFA). The non-traditional methods, such as DEA and SFA are more sophisticated method than the traditional accounting measurement of bank efficiency, overcoming traditional approach’s disadvantages. The banks are classified on different sub-groups in order to capture the reaction of different bank groups in respect to the financial crisis and the financial stabilization. We have collected the date from the official bank balance sheets as well as the profit and loss statements of Bulgarian credit institutions, published in the State Gazette, in order to define the inputs and outputs of banks. These methods have been applied in numerous studies of bank efficiency in a group of countries, but they are not used for the purpose of measuring the efficiency of the Bulgarian banking system for historical data.