Quality of Corporate Governance: A Review from the Literature

The purpose of this paper is to review the quality of corporate governance from the prior empirical literature. This study finds that most of the researchers developed the self structured corporate governance index and few researchers used the corporate governance index provided by rating agencies. This study also finds that there is no uniform basis to measure the corporate governance quality and observed the variation in terms of overall and individual attributes of corporate governance; sub-indices of corporate governance; scoring system; weighted and un-weighted method; statistical method; time period; financial and non financial companies; code of corporate governance; listing requirement; disclosure practices; legal environment; firms characteristics; and country perspective. This study also observed that overall corporate governance quality is very low in most of the studies and even quality of corporate governance varies in the firms within the same country. This study recommends that the boundary of corporate governance quality should be defined based on the agreed set of rules and regulation, code of governance and practices. This study also suggests that the regulator and policy makers should more emphasize on code of corporate governance and regulatory framework and monitoring to improve the quality of corporate governance.