Nonlinear effect of female board directorship on bank financial soundness

Recent literature on Corporate Annual Reports (CAR) underlines that, in order to meet the changing needs of CAR users, more narrative (forward looking) information should be provided, with a focus on those factors that are liable for longer term value of banks financial performance. This papes investigates the Management Commentary portion (MC) and specifically the effect of Corporate Governance Information (CGI) on banks’ reporting performance mechanisms such as board structure, audit function, bank size and common equity.

Return on Assets (ROA) ratio is used as a proxy to measure financial performance. The data sample comprises of 86 worldwide banks during the period of deep economic crisis (2008-2011). Novelty of the study is the search for the effect of core characteristics of corporate governance on banks’ performance during the financial crisis period. The research uses a Panel Estimated Generalized Least Squares (EGLS) regression model in order to examine the aforementioned effect. The results of this research suggest that boards’ independence strongly supports banks’ efficiency and operations, as well as external audit contributes positively to banks’ efficiency during the crisis period.

This paper is the first research attempt that investigates the impact of a large number of corporate governance mechanisms on the performance of Greek banks,employing widely accepted in the literature of corporate governance econometric models. Results indicate that system GMM models are more suitable methodological tools than pooledOLS and fixed effects models to address well-known econometric problems, such as endogeneity, simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity of individual banks. The findings, as derived from the application of GMM models, imply that increasing the board size and the number of independent directors can both have positive impact on the performance of Greek banks, but only up to a certain point. Thus, bank efficiency will increase as board size and the proportion of independent directors grow up to a point where these relationships hit a maximum from which bank performance decreases. Our multi-model estimations failed to trace any significant contribution of the number of female and foreign directors on the performance of Greek banks. Finally, the dual appointment of a CEO as Chairman appears to affect negatively two out of four proxies of bank performance. Overall, the results provide support for the positive impact of corporate governance mechanisms on the performance of Greek banks. The significance of these findings increases, considering that the period under study (2008-2014) is marked by high market volatility and uncertainty due to the well-known debt crisis that plagues Greece since the beginning of 2008.

Humans are considered to be different from each other with their acumen and intelligence. The working condition in IT sector has changed over the past few decades. There has been a drastic increase in the number of female employees towards the development of IT sector over the past few years. Gender diversity is creating a wide range of awareness and helps understand the importance of gender identity. IT industry which is a dominant industry in India has reckoned gender diversity as a major tool to ensure it stands on criteria of being competent and innovative in the ever changing dynamic business environment. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship between acceptance of gender diversity among the employees, diversity practices and programs adopted by the IT industries and barriers to the same.