This paper investigates the effects of ownership patterns on banks’ cost and profit efficiencies taking a sample of 607 commercial banks operating in 53 African countries during the period 2005–2015. Using pooled and modified true fixed effects (TFE) stochastic frontier panel approaches, we obtain two principal results. First, foreign-owned banks are not more profit or cost efficient than their domestic peers. Second, privately owned banks outperform state-owned banks. These findings result not only from bank-level inefficiencies but are explained by bank-level characteristics and macroeconomic conditions. Specifically, larger, older, and listed banks are associated with higher profit efficiency. This study also reveals that ownership concentration (blockholding) has adverse effects on the efficiency of banks.

This paper studies the reaction of the Euro's value against major currencies to sovereign rating announcements from Moody's, S&P and Fitch CRAs during the Eurozone debt crisis in 2010–2012 based on event study methodology combined with GARCH models. We also analyze how the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish government long-term bonds were affected by CRA announcements. Our results reveal that CRA downgrades, watchlist and outlook announcements had no impact on the value of the Euro currency but increased exchange rate volatility. At the same time, downgrades as well as negative outlook announcements increased the yields of French, Italian, and Spanish bonds and even affected the German bond's yields. This shows that the monetary union has led to a breakdown of the consequences of the rating shocks between currency value and sovereign bond yields. The reason is that part of the rating shock is absorbed by an internal repricing of sovereign bonds.