Corporate governance impact on financial performance: evidence from Asian listed companies

This study explores the relationship between specific governance mechanisms, namely shareholder activism, the independence of the audit committee, with the financial performance of Asian listed companies. The estimating methodology used panel data from a panel of 622 listed Asian companies observed from 2012 to 2019. We used three estimation methods to ensure the quality of the results. For our robustness estimation, we establish an endogeneity test for the shareholder activism variable and test its impact on financial performance. Our results revealed a positive and significant relationship between the financial performance variable gender diversity, activism and board independence variables. Other mechanisms had a negative impact such as the duality, independence of the audit committee. Finally, for the robustness check, the endogeneity test revealed that the shareholder activism variable is endogenous and directly the dependent variable of our model. Our contribution is to test the effect of shareholder activism as a governance mechanism, on the profitability of assets, especially in the Asian context with six countries.