Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirement for the MSc in Finance FINANCE DISSERTATION ON The effects of board characteristics on firm performance: an empirical evidence from non-financial firms listed on Vietnam stock market NGUYEN HOAI PHUONG ID No: 20171830 Intake 5 Supervisor: Dr. Tran Tat Thanh September 2022 1 17014129077501000000 Acknowledgements This study is the last assignment of the Program of Msc. in Finance of the Vietnam Banking Academy and University of the West of England. I would like to say thank you so much for the kindly support from the lecturers from the University.
For this study, I have received the huge instruction from my supervisor – Dr. Tran Tat Thanh. I would like to thank my supervisor during the process of the study. September, 2022 2 Abstract Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of board characteristics on firms performance of listed firms in Vietnam.
The data is extracted from finance.vn which is a prestige financial website, which has the financial database deriving from the financial reports of all listed company in Vietnam. Methodology approach: In the study, board characteristics including board size, board independence, board diversity and CEO duality is analyzed. Firm performance is measured by return on total assets (ROA), return on total equity (ROE) and Tobins’Q. The relationship between the board characteristics and firms performance is analyzed by using Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS).
The dataset includes 462 companies which are listed in Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HOSE) and Ha Noi Stock Exhange (HNX) in the period from 2018 to 2020. Findings: The study indicates the findings of multiple effects of board characteristics on firm performance. Board diversity and board size have positive impact on firm performance. This supports the diversity in gender and board members with accounting/ financial expertise as well as the large size of board.
Meanwhile, it does not support the separation of CEO/ Chairman roles and the outside directors on when the results shows that CEO duality and board independence have negative impact on firm performance. Keywords: board characteristics, firm performance, listed firm, Vietnam 3 Table of contents List of tables .7 Chapter II: Literature review and hypotheses development .2 Board of directors.1 Board size and firm performance .2 Board independence and firm performance .4 CEO duality with firm performance .13 Chapter III: Data collection and research methodology .1 Data and sample collection .2 Test of regression models .3 Method in this study .3 Measurement of variables .20 Chapter IV: Empirical results .1 Impact of board diversity on firm performance .2 Impact of board independence on firm performance .3 Impact of CEO duality on firm performance .4 Impact of board size on firm performance .5 Impact of control variables including firm size, financial leverage and capital intensity on firm performance .30 4 Chapter VI: Limitations and recommendations .36 5 List of tables Table1: Listed firms on HNX and HOSE in the period from 2018 to 2020. 15 Table 2: Summary of variables. 18 Table 3: Descriptive statistics.
21 Table 4: Correlations of variables. 22 Table 5: Variance inflation factor. 24 Table 6: Breusch-Pagan/ Cook-Weisberg test for heteroscedasticity. 24 Table 7: Woolridge test for auto correlation in panel data.
24 Table 8: F-test and Hausman test result. 25 Table 9: Wald test result. 25 Table 10: Regression result -ROA. 26 Table 11: Regression result -ROE.
26 Table 12: Regression result –Tobin’s Q. 27 6 Chapter I: Introduction Most of the companies also have a strong of organization of functional departments, in which, board of directors are the head office and play an important role in making the decisions, control and management. Many researchers pay their attention in the board characteristics. They are trying to extend the scope of the researches to many aspects of this topic, through diversifying the opinions and perspective in analyze, in order to address the existing issues relating to board characteristics that impact on firm performance.
There are a lot of researches conducted on the effects of board characteristics on firm performance. The study by Martinez and Alvarez (2019) give a global perspective about the impacts of board characteristics on firm performance. For Vietnamese listed firms, a study by Duc Hong Vo and Tri Minh Nguyen (2014) give the empirical findings in terms of the effects of corporate governance on firm performance. The board of directors play an important role on handing the key tasks of the companies.
According to Fama and Jensen (1983), “board of directors is represent as a significant mechanism for advising and monitoring, governance of companies to managing business activities for the benefit of shareholders”. Board of directors takes the responsibility for making the decision on strategy of the company, including “mergers and acquisitions, capital structures, and hiring or firing executives” (Terjesen, Couto and Francisco, 2016). Board of directors is related to corporate governance, which is a core of strategy and operation of a company. From selecting board of director to making decision on the company’s strategy, execution, management, they all belongs to corporate governance.
Corporate governance is related to characteristics of board of directors. Board of directors is responsible for making the decision on the firms strategy and its executive management. According to Maztinez and Alvarez (2019), there are two functions of board of directors which have impact on the corporate governance mechanism, which are to supervise the executive management and to provide the human resources to the company. Along with the process of equalization of the enterprises, the principal –agent problem is getting more and more important and have been attracting the attention of the economists as well as the company’s owners.
It is related to agency theory, when the owner (principal) delegates tasks to the managers (agent) with the expectation that the managers will be on behalf of the owner to make the decisions for the interest of the owners (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). The debates on whether separating the role of management and owners in the companies to prevent from any conflicts of interest, or there are the advantages of CEO duality that can bring the benefits to the companies. In the study, the chairman CEO duality is a variable in the model to test the its relationship to the firm performance. There are continuously debates and various findings about the board diversity that effect on firm performance.
Board diversity is still considerable because it is a composition which helps enhance firm value and performance with new perspectives and opinions (Siciliano, 1996). According to Aguilera (2005) and Kang et al. (2007), there are the differences in terms of regulation, culture, economic environments, size of capital markets and effectiveness of governance mechanism, which are much different between the developed countries’ and developing countries’ perspectives. Most of the empirical researches on board of diversity mainly derived from the developed 7 countries’ data.
The study on this topic in the Vietnam circumstance hopefully contributes to diversify the empirical researches on board diversity in terms of developing countries. Based on the previous studies on this topic, we can capture factors in board of directors that affects the firm performance. They includes size of board, education of board members, board independence, CEO duality, diversity of board, structure of board, etc. The firm performance is measured by so many accounting ratios such as ROA, ROE, Tobins’ Q, ZScore.
While there are a lot of researches on this topic, there are still the debates on the correlation between the composition in board characteristics with firm performance because of the diversity and difference in choosing from data collection to methodology. This topic, hence, is interesting for the researchers to continue finding out the new point of views, contributing to the enhance and expand the previous researches. In terms of practical application, the researches on this topic bring the companies managers, investors or people who concern about corporate governance related- issues and firm performance the valid and verifiable information to improve their understanding on the studied market in the research. The study is aiming at the find out the effects of board characteristics on firm performance of listed firms in Vietnam.
It examines the effects of board characteristics on firms performance, finding out the relationships between the firms performance and the board of directors feature, and provide an empirical evidence from non-financial firms listed on Vietnam stock market. The dataset of 462 non-financial companies listed on HOSE and HNX stock exchange in the period from 2018 -2020 are analyzed. The firms performance is measured by ROE, ROA and Tobin’s Q. The board characteristics are the composition of size, independent directors, board diversity (gender and accounting/financial background of directors on board), CEO duality.
The control variables consist of firm size, financial leverage and capital intensity. The data is panel data, thus, the model for the relationship between the corporate governance and performance is tested by Pooled OLS, FEM, REM and after that FLGS.Outline of the study The study consists of six chapters which includes subsectors. In chapter 2, the literature review on the theoretical background and empirical literature are presented. Chapter 2 points out the findings from previous studies which are related to the board characteristics with the firms performance.
In chapter 3, there are the discussion on the research methodology, which includes the statistical approach, describe how the regression models form, data collection, test the hypotheses and measurement of variables. The results of statistics are presented in chapter 4, which describes the descriptive statistics, followed by the correlation analysis, test for multi-collinearity, autocorrelation, heteroscedasticity. There are conclusions in chapter 5 and limitations discussion with recommendations in chapter 6. 8 Chapter II: Literature review and hypotheses development Board of directors is the management body of the company which has the authority on behalf of the company to decide and execute the rights and obligations of the company.
According to Bezemer et al. (2014), board of directors have authority to hire and fire executive directors, set up the compensation for CEO and get involve in financial statements. Board of directors play an important role in supervise and provide the resources to the company. The composition of the board of directors has the relationship with the firms performance.
The board size, board independence, CEO duality, and board diversity (gender related, directors with accounting and financial background, foreign members on board) are the factors that possibly effects on the decisions for every firms operation, leading to the different performance level of each company. This part includes the overview of the empirical findings on the effects of board characteristics on firm performance. The overview findings will concentrate on analyzing the results on studies with the similar topic which are conducted on the listed firms in both Vietnam and international to have the comprehensive comparisons.1 Agency theory Agency theory refers to the separation of the two parties: ownership and control (Martinez and Alvarez, 2019), closely relating to the two parties in the company, i.e the principal and the agent. The principal refers to the owners and the shareholders, and the agent is the manager hired by the owners.
When being hired by the owners, the agent is delegated to operate the firm under the control of the owners. The agent has to work for the benefit of the owners when being delegated by the agent. According to Panda and Leepsa (2017), there are the conflicts in the goals of the principal and the agent. When the principal’s goals are to maximize the value of the company, the agent’s goals is to increase their own interest.
This conflict of goals and interests between the owners and the managers may cause the agent costs for the companies. Board of directors plays an important role in limitating the risks that may be caused by agency problems. The agency theory which is applied in certain board of director characteristics will be explained further in the following part of this section.