Corporate governance: impacts in the value of Brazilian public corporations

Abstract

In this article we sought to verify whether the improvement in corporate governance practices in Brazil has already had an impact on the value of corporations, measured by the Tobin's Q. The investigation examined a non-probabilistic sample of public corporations, whose shares have liquidity and volatility different from zero. The research adopted the multiple linear regression method, which was applied to a secondary data base, thus enabling us to define the variables tested in our model. The data in question were taken from corporations' financial statements, obtained from the Economatica data base. We also used dummy variables for American Depositary Receipts (ADR) programs, ADR levels 2 and 3 (ADR23), corporations listed in the Bovespa's Differentiated Levels of Corporate Governance (henceforth referred to as DLCG) and the New Market (NM), in order to represent the different levels of corporate governance achieved. The research obtained highly significant statistical results for dummy variables ADR and NM in relation to Tobin's Q, suggesting that the improvement in corporate governance practices has already had an impact on the value of public corporations whose shares have significant levels of liquidity and price volatility.