Do Corporate Governance “Actors”’ Features Affect Banks’ Value? – Evidence From Romania

The purpose of our empirical study is to identify and discuss the influences of various features of corporate governance “actors” over strategies followed and performances reached in Romanian banking system. The features considered for analysis refers to provenience, size, independence and gender diversity of executive management and board of directors, as well as to provenience, structure, origin and concentration of shareholders. The research methodology used for achieving our goal is based on econometric analysis using various statistical tools, like correlations for identifying the relationships between independent and dependent variables, and regressions for developing the models revealing how corporate governance characteristics influence banks value and their business strategy. The results of the performed analysis reveal positive correlations between banks’ traditional strategies and performances, and foreign corporate governance (board of directors, executive management and shareholders), made majority by male members, where CEO duality avoidance is ensured, the board of directors is entirely independent and the majority of shareholders are coming from European Union members states. The only negative correlation appeared to be between shareholders structure and banks value, revealing that those banks that still have individuals within its ownership performed lower.