The main objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between bank efficiency
estimates and stock performance of a sample of seven transition countries over the period 1995-2006.
Instead of focusing only on the earnings information and its components as possible explanatory
variables for the bank stock price changes, this analysis aims to determine whether cost efficiency or
profit efficiency estimate is a primary determinant of the bank stock return. The selection of
aforementioned countries is based on the data availability. The contribution of this study to the
literature is three-fold: First, despite a large amount of literature in the banking sector of transition
countries, to the author’s best best knowledge, this is the first study that examine such relationship for
these countries, which have shown an increasing effort to adopt the EU regulations. Second, it utilizes
both cost and profit efficiency to investigate whether such information has an explanatory power on
the bank stock price performance even though most of the previous studies concentrate on the
relationship between cost efficiency, technical and/or scale efficiency1 . Profit efficiency is assumed to
be more superior to cost efficiency in terms of combining both costs and revenues in the measurement
of efficiency. Furthermore, it is considered as one of the most important key factors that attempt to explain stock performance since stockholders would be much more interested in the profits of a bank
rather than its costs, as the dividends they get specifically depend upon the bank’s earnings. Therefore,
this is not surprising that profit efficiency estimates are expected to explain stock performance better
(Ioannidis et al., 2008). Third, the time period examined covers a unique and large data set, which is
characterized by the inclusion of major reforms made in the transition process to establish a more
efficient and less fragile banking system.