Bank Ownership and Performance Does Politics Matter?

This paper uses a new dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separate estimations for developing and industrial countries. It finds that state-owned banks located in developing countries tend to have lower profitability and higher costs than their private counterparts, and that the opposite is true for foreign-owned banks. The paper finds no strong correlation between ownership and performance for banks located in industrial countries. Next, the paper tests whether the differential in performance between public and private banks is driven by political considerations by checking whether this differential widens during election years; it finds strong support for this hypothesis.