Board Characterstics and Firm Performance: Case of Saudi Arabia

Corporate governance (CG) has received much attention in the current studies all over the world especially after many corporate scandals and the failures of some biggest firms around the world such as Commerce Bank (1991) Enron (2001), Adelphia (2002), and World Com (2002). The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between board mechanisms (audit committee size, audit committee composition, board size, and board composition) and firm performance (ROA) based on the annual reports of listed companies in the year 2011 of sample of non-financial firms in the Saudi Market (Tadawul). For the purpose of this study, data was collected from a sample of 102 non-financial listed companies. Furthermore, an analysis of regression analysis is utilized to examine the relationship between board characteristics and firm performance. The results of this study reveal that audit committee size, audit committee composition and board size have no effect on firm performance in the selected sample while board composition has a significant negative relationship with firm performance

Institutional directors and corporate social responsibility disclosure in the Jordanian banks

This study examines the impact of institutional directors on the level of corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) in the Jordanian banks.A comprehensive CSR checklist, consisting of 100 items, is designed to collect the data from 147 observations from 2004 to 2013.The descriptive analysis shows, relatively, a low level of CSRD with a mean of 46%. In addition, institutional directors occupy 46.4% of the banks’ board seats. The analysis shows that 11% of the institutional directors are serving as CEOs, 22.5% are independent institutional directors and 65.5% are non-independent non-executive directors.Results from multiple regression analysis show that institutional directors, has a negative and non-significant impact on the level of CSRD.However, we break down the institutional directors to two groups based on their status; institutional independent directors and institutional non-independent non-executive directors.The results show that the two groups have positive significant impacts on the level of CSRD.Then, the institutional CEO (CEO institutional-affiliated) is analyzed and it has a significant negative impact.Regarding the control variables, bank age and leverage significantly and positively enhance the CSRD while board size and profitability (ROA) are insignificantly related to CSRD