The effect of corporate governance and financial leverage on efficiency of Pakistan textile sector

Abstract

This research observes the effect of corporate governance and financial leverage on the efficiency of listed companies in Pakistan. The variables return on assets and return on equity are chosen as the firm’s efficiency of the textile sector for this research. Measures of corporate governance used are board size, director’s remuneration, and Audit committee members, whereas financial leverage is used as a control variable. The data of corporate governance, financial leverage, and efficiency variable are composed of annual reports of the top ten listed textile companies from Karachi stock exchange. The research consists of the period from 2012 to 2017. Panel data is used to examine four hypotheses and to test the significance of corporate governance and financial leverage on a firm's performance the OLS regression models are applied. The finding of this study revealed that board size, audit committee, director's remuneration is positively correlated with a firm's performance ROA and ROE, and conversely, financial leverage is negatively correlated with a firm's performance. Overall regression result of this study discovered that the audit committee members and financial leverage are statistically insignificant, whereas board size and director’s remuneration are statistically positive significant. This concludes that there is no significant association between corporate governance and firm’s performance as well as financial leverage with the firm's performance. The sample size of this study was small and this research is limited to the textile sector of Pakistan. Future researchers may have included more determinants of corporate governance such as women on board, board meeting, family ownership structure, etc.