Corporate Governance, Accounting Outcomes, and Organizational Performance

Abstract

The empirical research examining the association between typical measures of corporate governance and various accounting and economic outcomes has not produced a consistent set of results. We believe that these mixed results are partially attributable to the difficulty in generating reliable and valid measures for the complex construct that is termed corporate governance. Using a sample of 2,106 firms and 39 structural measures of corporate governance (e.g., board characteristics, stock ownership, institutional ownership, activist stock ownership, existence of debt-holders, mix of executive compensation, and anti-takeover variables), our exploratory principal component analysis suggests that there are 14 dimensions to corporate governance. We find that these indices have a mixed association with abnormal accruals, little relation to accounting restatements, but some ability to explain future operating performance and future excess stock returns.

Keywords: corporate governance, earnings quality, firm performance, principal component analysis, recursive partitioning

JEL Classification: G34, M41, J33, G32, G12, G14