The Relevance of Good Corporate Governance Practices to Bank Performance

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate governance instruments impact firm value in the context of Cambodian banks. This paper considers foreign and domestic-owned banks in Cambodia. This study opts for a balanced sample of foreign and domestic owned banks for the period 2014-2018. Panel data regression is adopted for estimation of main results. The suitable model, i.e. fixed and random effect model is selected using the Hausman specification test where the result shows that the random effect model using generalized least square (GLS) regression is more suitable for the analysis. The findings show that Cambodian banks are having a substantially higher percentage of NEDs on their board, high implementation of governance procedures on board committees where on average the banks are having more than the required two board committees (audit and risk committees) as required by the Prakas on the governance of banks by National Bank of Cambodia. The average board size is around 8 members of which at least 3 members are having a postgraduate degree or a professional qualification. Policymakers need to improve on their supervisory function as the majority of the domestic and some foreign banks do not disclose their annual reports on their company website as required by the Prakas on Corporate Governance of Banks operating in Cambodia. Moreover, amendments should be made to the current corporate governance code for financial institutions as there are no explanatory notes that guide companies and therefore, the current guideline is open to individual and subjective interpretation.