Analysis of Factors Affecting Corporate Governance Maturity Level: A Research on the Companies Traded on Borsa İstanbul

Corporate governance, one of the management theories, is one of the important topics for companies. Compliance with corporate governance principles is a sensitive issue, especially in companies whose shares are traded on stock exchange markets, which have thousands/millions of investors and stakeholders, and/or operate internationally. Today, the economic activities of companies and their social interaction with their ecosystem have become dynamic on a national and global scale. The basic principles of corporate governance “transparency”, “responsibility”, “accountability”, “fairness” and the related obligations have great importance for companies. In Turkey, listed companies are obliged to comply with a significant part of the corporate governance principles with the regulations of the Capital Markets Board. As for the items that they are not obliged to comply with, as of 2018, there are reporting obligations with the “comply or explain” view on the Public Disclosure Platform operated by the Cen-tral Registry Agency. In this study, trading duration after initial public offering and corporate governance compliance reports of publicly traded companies have been taken into account, and Corporate Governance Maturity Level and Corporate Governance Maturity Index were studied with the developed methodology based on the subsections of “Shareholders”, “Trans-parency”, “Stakeholders” and “Board of Directors”. In the study, the effect of the duration after initial public offering on the Corporate Governance Maturity Level was examined in general and by subsections using Tukey HSD analysis. It is envisaged that being first study on this subject, it will have a leading impact on further next academic studies. As a result of the study, i) Except for 2021, when the number of newly traded companies is high, the Corporate Gover-nance Maturity Index values of the listed companies tend to increase. ii) The maturity level of industrial companies is above the stock market average. iii) While the maturity level of listed companies is higher in terms of principles regarding public disclosure, it is the lowest in terms of principles related to the board of directors. iv) There is an improvement in the Corporate Governance Maturity Level, depending on the length of time the companies are traded on the stock exchange, and the level of compliance with the principles regarding public disclosure and transparency and shareholders is relatively higher.