The Effect of Ownership on the Performance of the Banking System in Iran

the present study was to investigate the impact of ownership type on the performance of Iranian banks. To this end, the performance of the given banks was measured by three indices including return on equity, return on assets, and cost-to-operating income ratio. The bank assets, loan-to-deposit ratio, liquidity ratio, leverage ratio, operating profit margin ratio, and debt-to-asset ratio were also included in the model as control variables. Moreover, three dummy variables were defined to investigate ownership effect, privatization effect, as well as the effect of getting listed on the stock exchange. The time period of the study was between 2004 and 2015. Besides, the study covered 17 banks including 7 private banks, 6 state-owned banks, and 4 privatized banks. In general, the results of the generalized estimating equation of the population-averaged model in the Stata 14.2 software indicated that private banks had yielded better performance indices compared with state-owned ones, but privatization of state-owned, had not brought about an improvement as well as increased efficiency in these banks.