This research focuses on the relationship between corporate governance and performance
in the largest European listed banks, which have been studied to a lesser extent within this
field. The study is based on agency theory and we use a sample of 404 observations referring to
97 banks selected from the annual ranking of the 2,000 biggest companies in the world prepared
by Forbes. The paper covers the period from 2006 to 2010, thus, examining the changes in the
performance drivers in the recent financial crisis. On the basis of the panel data analysis, we confirm
that the variety of governance factors including board size, insider appointed, directors’ age, board
meetings and affiliated committees influence the performance of the banks. This paper contributes
to a better understanding of the effect of corporate governance on the financial performance of the
financial companies in times of high capital market volatility.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
