Board of Directors, Audit Quality and Firm Performance: Evidence from Malaysia

National Research & Innovation Conference for Graduate Students in Social Sciences 2012 (GS-NRIC) December 7-9, 2012, Mahkota Hotel, Melaka

10 Pages Posted: 3 May 2013

See all articles by Masood Fooladi

Masood Fooladi

Islamic Azad University, Mobarakeh Branch

Zaleha Abdul Shukor

National University of Malaysia

Date Written: December 7, 2012

Abstract

From the agency theory perspective, the importance of Corporate Governance (CG) is to mitigate the agency conflicts between managers and shareholders. In other words, CG as a mechanism aims to align management's goals with those of the stakeholders, which are to increase firm performance. Since, the value creation of CG can be measured through the firm performance; the aim of this study is to answer this question: ''is there any relationship between CG and firm performance?'' Therefore, three board characteristics that are of interest in this study include board independency, CEO duality, and board size. In addition, audit quality is considered as an external CG characteristic affecting firm performance. Based on a randomly selected sample of companies listed on Bursa Malaysia and applying the linear multiple regression as the underlying statistical tests, it is found that audit quality has a significantly positive relationship with firm performance as measured by Return on Asset (ROA) and Tobin’s Q (TQ). In addition, we find that board independency and CEO duality have respectively positive and negative relationship with TQ. However, there is no significant relationship between board characteristics and ROA. We conclude that market participants considers board independency as an effective monitoring mechanism while in reality, it does not have any significant effect on return on assets invested in a firm.

Keywords: Corporate Governance, Board of Directors, Audit Quality, Firm Performance

JEL Classification: G30

Suggested Citation

Fooladi, Masood and Shukor, Zaleha Abdul, Board of Directors, Audit Quality and Firm Performance: Evidence from Malaysia (December 7, 2012). National Research & Innovation Conference for Graduate Students in Social Sciences 2012 (GS-NRIC) December 7-9, 2012, Mahkota Hotel, Melaka, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2259523

Masood Fooladi (Contact Author)

Islamic Azad University, Mobarakeh Branch ( email )

Department of Accounting
Mobarakeh Branch
Mobarakeh, Isfahan
Iran

Zaleha Abdul Shukor

National University of Malaysia ( email )

Bangi, Selangor 43600
Malaysia

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
1,514
Abstract Views
6,634
Rank
23,004
PlumX Metrics