Does the Entry Mode of Foreign Banks Matter for Bank Efficiency? Evidence from Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of specific modes of entry of foreign banks, i.e. greenfield investment versus merger and acquisition, on bank performance in three transition economies - the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We use stochastic frontier analysis to model and measure the cost efficiency of banks. We adopt a maximum likelihood approach to estimation in which the variance of the one-sided error term is modeled jointly with the cost frontier, thus enabling us to retrieve efficiency scores, as well as estimating the various determinants of X-inefficiency. We first find that foreign banks are generally more cost efficient than their domestic counterparts, a result that confirms those of the existing empirical literature. We then turn our focus to comparative performance of greenfield banks versus merger and acquisition banks (M&As), and of M&As versus domestic banks. The results show that on average, M&As are surpassed in terms of efficiency by greenfields banks, but no cost efficiency difference is apparent between M&As and domestic banks. However, we find a strong age effect with respect to M&As which suggests that the evolution of M&As' efficiency follows an inverse U-shape, that means M&As tend to get more inefficient following the acquisition, but approximately 4 years and a haft later, their efficiency starts to improve.

Keywords: Banking, Transition Economies, Foreign Bank Entry, Greenfield, Mergers

JEL Classification: G21, F36, C01