Does Corporate Governance Influence the Efficiency of Brazilian Companies?

Abstract

Conflicts of interest between managers and owners is an oft-studied issue in academia, first documented by Berle and Means in 1932, which exposes the classic conflict of interest between agent and principal discussed in agency theory. The premise of corporate governance is that people in corporations do not necessarily act in funders' best interest. Based on this assumption, this study investigates the influence of aspects of corporate governance on the efficiency of publicly traded Brazilian companies. The study combines static optimization techniques through data envelopment analysis (DEA) to identify the efficiency of publicly traded companies, using panel data to identify the influence of corporate governance on company efficiency. The data were manually collected from 20-F reports from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for Brazilian companies that had American depositary receipts (ADRs) because the database is not entirely available in Brazil. Many of the hypotheses were confirmed, thereby showing the particular conditions of corporate finance in Brazil with respect to corporate governance. The immaturity of the Brazilian capital market is perceived in various analyses, emphasizing that the history of the Brazilian corporate system is one of the limiting factors of the efficiency of companies. The conditions that prevail are the following: (i) high ownership-management overlap; (ii) boards with low effectiveness; (iii) in family groups, the poor definitions of the roles of stockholders, boards and management; (iv) the lack of clarity related to the cost-benefit relationship for good governance; (v) inefficiency of the boards of directors and (vi) evidence of conflicts of interests, diminished by explicit and implicit incentives.