Central Bank Review, cilt.16, ss.127-136, 2016 (Scopus)
This study aims to investigate the cost
efficiency of Turkish commercial banks over the restructuring period of the
Turkish banking system, which coincides with the 2008 financial global crisis
and the 2010 European sovereign debt
crisis. To this end,
within the stochastic frontier framework, we employ true fixed effects model,
where the unobserved bank heterogeneity is integrated in the inefficiency
distribution at a mean level. To select the cost function with the most
appropriate inefficiency correlates, we first adopt a search algorithm and then
utilize the model averaging approach to verify that our results are not exposed
to model selection bias. Overall, our empirical results reveal that cost
efficiencies of Turkish banks have improved over time, with the effects of the
2008 and 2010 crises remaining rather limited. Furthermore, not only the cost
efficiency scores but also impacts of the crises on those scores appear to vary
with regard to bank size and ownership structure, in accordance with much of
the existing literature.