Comparative Study of Domestic and Foreign Bank Performance in Thailand: The Regression Analysis

This paper studies the performance of domestic and foreign banks in Thailand in terms of profitability and other characteristics after the East Asian financial crisis. The study is based on a micro bank-level panel data on financial statements by pooling cross-bank time-series data with the major balance sheet and income statement ratios for domestic and foreign banks in Thailand for 1995–2000. All banks were found to have reduced their credit exposure during the crisis years, and to have gradually improved their profitability during the post-crisis years. The results indicate that foreign bank profitability is higher than the average profitability of the domestic banks although importantly, in the post-crisis period, the gap between foreign and domestic profitability become closer. This shows some positive results of the financial restructuring program. Copyright Springer 2005