Corporate governance (CG) has received much attention in the current studies all over the world especially after many corporate scandals and the failures of some biggest firms around the world such as Commerce Bank (1991) Enron (2001), Adelphia (2002), and World Com (2002). The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between board mechanisms (audit committee size, audit committee composition, board size, and board composition) and firm performance (ROA) based on the annual reports of listed companies in the year 2011 of sample of non-financial firms in the Saudi Market (Tadawul). For the purpose of this study, data was collected from a sample of 102 non-financial listed companies. Furthermore, an analysis of regression analysis is utilized to examine the relationship between board characteristics and firm performance. The results of this study reveal that audit committee size, audit committee composition and board size have no effect on firm performance in the selected sample while board composition has a significant negative relationship with firm performance.

This paper aims to examine the impact of board characteristics on the level of corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) in the Jordanian banking sector for a sample of 147 banks/years during a period of 10 years (2004-2013). A checklist consisting of 100 items is developed to measure the disclosure level and the result indicates a relatively low level of disclosure in Jordanian banks. Multiple regression analysis is employed to examine the developed hypotheses. The results indicated that the larger board size and higher level of disclosure are correlated. However, low level of disclosure is associated to higher proportion of independent directors and institutional directors. In addition, female director is found to negatively affect the level of disclosure. This study has filled some of the previous studies’ gaps; the study is conducted in a new business environment. Besides, previous CSRD’s studies have not considered some of the board characteristics such as institutional directors. Thus this study investigates their impacts on the level of CSRD. In addition, this study provides some guidelines for the future works. Furthermore, the findings of this study might be interested to several groups of shareholders and stakeholders such as government, regulators, potential investors and CSR agencies.

The aim of this paper is to examine the optimal board size in the Jordanian banking sector with a focus on the accounting performance using a panel data from 2004 to 2013. In general, we find that the board size and bank performance are related but not at a significant level. Interestingly, we find that neither too small boards nor too large boards are effectively enhancing the bank accounting performance. The study concludes that the optimal board size is between 9 to 12 directors. Boards with less than nine directors are found to be insignificantly related to the bank performance while boards with more than 12 members are significantly and negatively related to the performance. Currently, the corporate governance codes suggest the board to be at least five directors and not more than 13 directors. Thus, this study suggests the policy makers to limit the size of the board to 9-12 directors only.

The main objective of this study is to examine the relationship between government ownership and bank performance in Jordan. The banking sector has been widely ignored in the past corporate governance studies due to its strict system. Using a panel data from 2004 to 2013 (147 observations/years), the multiple regression analysis shows that increasing the percentage of shareholdings leads to higher profitability. Additional government-linked banks (GLBs) generally outperform their unlinked counterparts. However, their outperformance is contingent to the significance percentage of the shareholdings. On other words, if the government shareholdings are not significant (less than 10%) the government ownership does not make a significant difference in the performance. Using panel data provide us with a significant roles played by the period of the study. The banks show increasing in their performance through the period of this study. However, the size and the age of the banks are found to be insignificant while the leveraged banks significantly underperform their counterparts. The results of this study might be of interest of potential investors, policy makers, governance agencies and information users.