Authors: Pantelis Zisis, Augustinos Dimitras

Title: BOARD OF DIRECTORS CHARACTERISTICS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE QUALITY

Abstract

The Corporate Governance concept has gained nowadays considerable attention in the business area worldwide. The deficiencies in the leading world economies such as USA and Europe, caused by organizations’ scandals as well as the recent financial crisis, underlined lack of confidence in the operating markets. The improvement of Corporate Governance is now recognized as a stability factor in most of the developing and developed countries worldwide.

The board of directors is fundamental to corporate governance mechanisms. The existing literature focuses mainly on the following issues: how able is the board to monitor the entity’s performance, how the board contributes to shareholder wealth, Does board composition matter and the interaction of board with management. This paper synthesizes the literature by way of giving answers to the above issues.

The current study seeks to examine the impact of board of directors characteristics on corporate governance. The paper adopts a quantitative analysis approach. It examines the data provided by Thomson Reuters in order to determine the relation of corporate governance quality with various board of directors measures. The underlying model is based on the linear (in parameters) specification, using the method of panel data least squares.