Measuring the relative efficiency of banking industry has been one of the most interesting areas of research for the past few years. There are literally various techniques for measuring the relative performance of similar units such as banks including data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative performance of some Iranian banks located in province of Alborz, Iran for two consecutive fiscal years of 2009 and 2010. The proposed study implements stochastic frontier analysis to measure the performance of these banks based on two set of criteria. In the first model, total loans devoted are considered as output and employees, total customers?investment, total fixed assets as well as no-interest deposits are considered as inputs of the model. For the second model, special banks?characteristics such as total economic value of branch, the ratio of fixed assets to total assets, educational backgrounds of employees as well as the level of automation in the system are considered as input parameters of the systems. The results indicate that most bank perform relatively well according to their efficiencies.

Measuring relative efficiency of various universities has been a subject for years. In fact, when there is a growing competition among educational units, it is important to find facts on each university for making managerial decisions. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the relative efficiencies among different private universities in Iran. The proposed study of this paper uses data envelopment analysis along with Malmquist productivity index to measure the relative efficiencies of these units over the period 2004-2007. The method uses three inputs including number of students, number of university professors and the number of employees. The model also includes the number of educated people as well as research outputs for outputs of the DEA model. The results indicate that there are some big gaps among various units in terms of the number of research products and the number of graduated students.