Privatization which refers to the transition of ownership and management of state-owned enterprises to the private sector, is one of the main drivers of economic prosperity. In this paper, the performance of the state, private, and privatized banks have been compared through examining the effects of privatization in the banking system on its performance. The data from 11 banks during the 13-years period (2005-2017) has been used in this research. Due to the time of major privatization (2009) and the imposition of restrictions on the banking system in the form of sanctions, two dummy variables are used to distinguish their effects. To this purpose, panel regression, parametric and non-parametric tests have been used that have all the same results. The results of panel regression model which is used to examine the effects of privatization on the profitability of the entire banking system showed that privatization has had a positive and significant effect on the performance of banks in terms of profitability. In the first step, parametric and non-parametric tests have been used with the aim of comparing the performance of privatized banks with that of private and state banks in the period before and after privatization; then, these tests were used with the aim of comparing the performance of privatized banks in the period before and after the privatization. The results showed that there were significant differences in these two periods. In the third step, the performance of privatized banks in the period before and after privatization with state and private banks were compared. The results showed that the performance of privatized banks was only improved compared with state banks and was almost the same as private banks.
