【正文】 iptive work exists on these financial sector reforms and bank privatizations, ., Bonin, Mizsei, Sz233。cKunt and Huizinga (2020) investigate performance differences between domestic and foreign banks in eighty countries, both developed and developing, over an eightyear period from 1988 to 1995. These authors find that foreign bank entry was followed by a reduction in both the profitability and the overhead expenses of domestic banks and that foreign banks in developing countries perform better than do domestic banks. For Latin American countries, Crystal, Dages, and Goldberg (2020) argue that 石家莊鐵道大學(xué)四方學(xué)院畢業(yè)論文 17 foreign bank entry is associated with improved production of financial services and more banking petition。 in particular, government ownership of banks is less efficient than private ownership and foreign bank entry has a salutary effect on banking sectors. Much of the empirical literature on banking in transition countries addresses the impact of foreign bank entry on banking efficiency. Hasan and Marton (2020), Drakos (2020), and Fries and Taci (2020) demonstrate that the entry of more efficient foreign banks creates an environment that forces the entire banking system to bee more efficient, both directly and indirectly, in transition countries. Buch (2020) pares interest rate spreads in the three fasttrack transition countries, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, from 1995 to 1999. She finds evidence confirming the hypothesis tha t foreign banks create a more petitive market environment in transition economies, but only after they have attained sufficient aggregate market share. A few studies examine the effects of ownership on individual bank efficiency. For Poland, Nikiel and Opiela (2020) find that foreign banks servicing foreign and business customers are more costefficient but less profitefficient than other banks in Poland. Bonin, Hasan, and Wachtel (2020) examine the performance of banks in eleven transition countries and show that majority foreign ownership is associated with improved bank efficiency. However, these authors cannot investigate privatization directly because their data do not distinguish among different types of foreign bank ownership. Studies focusing specifically on the effects of bank privatization are less numerous. Verbrugge, Megginson and Owens (2020) document marginal performance improvements and increases in equity among privatized banks in OECD countries. For Argentina, Clark and Cull (1999, 2020) study the privatization process and show that the success of the provincial bank privatization depended on the effectiveness of the buyers. These authors find evidence that credit allocation and efficiency are higher in privatized banks. The 石家莊鐵道大學(xué)四方學(xué)院畢業(yè)論文 18 transformation of the Argentine banking system occurred mainly through domestic mergers and acquisitions so that foreign banks played only a relatively minor role. In the transition countries, the prevalence of foreign strategic owners in formerly stateowned but subsequently privatized banks makes it crucial to distinguish these banks from foreign Greenfield banks when analyzing bank privatization. In this paper, we focus on six relatively advanced transition countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. We chose not to include banks in very small transition economies, ., the Baltic countries and Slovenia, and those in less advanced transition economies that have only recently restructured the banking system, ., the former Soviet Union, Albania and the other Balkan states. In the next section, we present a brief description of the privatization experiences in these six countries to establish that the strategies and the timing of privatizations are sufficiently different to allow us to use these experiences as the basis for an empirical analysis of privatization. Section 3 describes our dataset and presents the results of testing for differences in means across bank types for several measures of bank performance and for several bank characteristics. Section 4 characterizes briefly our methodology of deriving profit and cost efficiency measures from stochastic frontier estimates that allow for country and year effects directly in a pooled data set. In this section, we relate the bank efficiency scores, as well as a measure of financial performance, to the type of ownership and the method of privatization in secondstage regressions. Section 5 concludes with a brief summary focusing on policy implications. 2. Bank Privatization in Six Transition Economies Pretransition banking sectors were designed to meet the needs of a centrally planned economy(CPE).Intermediation between savers and borrowers was internalized within the state banking apparatus basically through a system of directed credits to stateowned enterprises for both investment needs and budget allocations for the working capital necessary to meet the output plan. In most CPEs, large specialty banks performed specific 石家莊鐵道大學(xué)四方學(xué)院畢業(yè)論文 19 functions. A state savings bank, with an extensive branch work, collected virtually all household deposits. A foreign trade bank handled all transactions involving foreign currency. An agricultural bank provided shortterm financing to the agricultural sector. on bank funded longterm capital projects and infrastructure ,banking activities were both subservient to the plan and segmented along functional lines in CPEs. In the transition economies (TEs), the first step in banking sector reform involved creating a twotier system with mercial banking activities carved out of the old central bank. At the beginning of the decade, the new banking sectors in the former CPEs consisted of the newly created mercial banks and the specialty banks, both types having universal banking licenses, along with a few