I know that recursion is sometimes a lot cleaner than looping, and I'm not asking anything about when I should use recursion over iteration, I know there are lots of questions about that already.

What I'm asking is, is recursion ever faster than a loop? To me it seems like, you would always be able to refine a loop and get it to perform more quickly than a recursive function because the loop is absent constantly setting up new stack frames.

I'm specifically looking for whether recursion is faster in applications where recursion is the right way to handle the data, such as in some sorting functions, in binary trees, etc.