Foreign entry and the Turkish banking system in 2000s

In recent decades, the role of foreign ownership in banking sectors, and especially the developing ones has become a frequently investigated topic among finance scholars. Similar to many other developing countries seeking to attract foreign direct investments, Turkey has experienced a great increase in the number of foreign-owned banks in the sector following the 2000 and 2001 economic and financial crises. Using panel data regression analysis for a sample of 31 deposit banks operating in Turkey, for the period 2002–2012, we find that foreign ownership has a negative and statistically significant impact on accounting profits, proxied by the ratio of earnings before taxes to total assets. However, contrary to expectations, three other dependent variables representing interest rate spreads, non-lending activities and short term risk, were not found to be significantly associated with foreign ownership.