This paper examines the impact of board diversity, CEO characteristics, and board committees on the financial performance of the companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE). In order to test the influence of these characteristics, detailed data on more than 70 firms are collected by hand, for the 2016–2020 period, and comprehensive regression models are estimated. The findings show that there are positive effects of board diversity especially with regard to the independent board members. In terms of the board committees, the audit committee is found to have a favourable influence. The regression coefficients imply that a 10% increase in the share of independent board members would be associated with a 0.93% increase in ROE. Based on these findings, it can be argued that improving the corporate governance practices of the companies listed on the BSE would increase the performance and the value of these firms.

This paper studies the impact of independent board members on the financial performance of companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange during the period 2016–2020. Different characteristics of the board of directors have been examined extensively in the literature and board independence was identified as one of the most effective corporate governance tools. In this context, the present study contributes to the relevant literature by examining recent data for Romania and investigating alternative performance indicators such as return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Tobin’s Q. The correlation analysis, scatter plots, and regression results document that a higher share of the independent board members was associated with higher returns on equity ratio. Specifically, a 10% rise in the share of independent members was associated with an approximately 0.9%-point increase in ROE.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the role of Investor Relations (IR) in the performance of companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. The study is motivated by the findings in the literature that investor relations may boost information disclosure, analyst following, institutional investor share, liquidity, and business valuation. The current article contributes to the relevant literature by making use of the recently released unique database of VEKTOR scores on company investor relations for 2019 and 2020. The main finding based on regression methodology shows that IR scores have a strong positive relationship with firm performance. Specifically, a one standard deviation rise in the IR score corresponds to a 2.6% rise in company ROA. Companies may be advised to strengthen their investor relations based on these findings about the beneficial role of investor relations.

This paper investigates corporate governance from a cross-country perspective and makes a comparison with Romania. There are studies that examine the corporate governance issues related to Romanian companies, but these studies provide only qualitative and descriptive accounts of the research topic, with limited cross-country analysis. The present paper complements the literature by producing a quantitative analysis of cross-country corporate governance and makes a comparison with Romania. For this purpose, a set of corporate governance indicators from a large sample of 39 advanced and developing countries was collected for the 2006–2020 period. In terms of corporate governance dimensions, it was found that Romania underperforms other developing countries in the dimensions of director liability and ownership and control, while it outperforms them in the dimensions of corporate transparency, disclosure, and shareholder rights. The results indicate that the stagnant corporate governance scores and the low development level of stock markets stand out as important business challenges for the country. The correlation and regression analyses show that stock market development is closely associated with corporate governance dimensions and, overall, corporate governance scores matter greatly for the economic growth of countries, such as Romania, which can benefit greatly from the improvement of corporate governance codes and practices in the private sector.

This paper examines the role of two-tier boards versus one-tier board systems for the case of firms listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE). The literature shows that one-tier or unitary and twotier or dualistic board systems have different advantages and disadvantages, like lower levels of information problems in unitary systems and higher levels of independence in the case of two-tier systems. The purpose of this paper is to collect information on various board and firm characteristics from around 60 companies with the unitary system and 6 companies with the dual system listed on BSE and analyses the differences that impact their financial performance. The results indicate that companies with a two-tier system are larger and have larger board sizes. In addition, they have better performance on average, measured by the return on equity indicator. However, the regression results indicate that these positive performance effects of the two-tier board become statistically insignificant when the various board and company characteristics are included as control variables. The low sample size of the two-tier board companies is a possible factor creating statistically insignificant results. The additional regressions results show that when the share of independent board members increases by 10%, the ROE increases by 1.26%.