In the early 1990s, the Brazilian government carried out one of the largest privatization programs in the world. With microdata on Brazilian firms, we study whether privatization has reduced the costs of production of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Past literature has assessed whether privatization has increased firms total factor productivity (TFP). We argue that privatization could impact the costs of production by another mechanism besides TFP: SOEs may exhibit distortions that prevent them from choosing the cost-minimizing mix of inputs, and privatization may mitigate these distortions. By estimating the production function, we can not only estimate the TFP of firms but also write the first-order conditions of the cost minimization problem and obtain a measure of these distortions. Our results suggest firms enhance their TFP following privatization and make better allocations of capital. According to our results, in the long run, the improvement in the allocation decision accounts for 14.37per cent of the cost reduction after privatization.