خصوصی سازی بانک و بهره وری: مدارک و شواهد برای برزیل

Over the last decade, the Brazilian banking industry has undergone major and deep transformations with several privatizations of state-owned banks, mergers and acquisitions, closing down of troubled banks, entry by foreign banks, etc. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of these changes in banking total factor productivity. We first obtain measures of bank-level productivity by employing the techniques due to Levinsohn and Petrin [Levinsohn, J., Petrin, A., 2003. Estimating production functions using inputs to control for unobservables. Review of Economic Studies 70, 317–342]. We then relate such measures to a set of bank characteristics. Our main results indicate that state-owned banks are less productive than their private peers, and that privatization has increased productivity.

The banking system in Brazil is the largest and the most complex one in Latin America. Like in many parts of the world, the banking industry in Brazil is undergoing a process of rapid and radical transformations. The common features of this process, in Brazil and elsewhere, include: an increase in competition from within the industry as well as from the outside; a wave of merger and acquisition (M&A) activities, including several cross-border deals; more globalized capital markets with highly volatile capital flows, which are capable of causing havoc in some national financial sectors; new financial products, with increasing reliance on off-balance sheet activities; new banking practices brought out by the information technology revolution.

In the 1990s, the Brazilian banking sector underwent huge transformations. Following the control of the inflationary process, there was an intense wave of mergers and acquisitions, involving not only domestic agents but also foreign banks. Many state-owned banks were privatized; some of them were closed down. Many troubled private banks also went bust. Improved bank regulation and supervision were also put into action. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how bank productivity was affected by these changes. Particular attention was paid to the effects of the privatization of state-owned banks.