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Evolution and Determinants of Firm-Level Corporate Governance Quality in Brazil

This paper analyzes the evolution and the determinants of firm-level corporate governance practices in Brazil from 1998 to 2004 using a broad corporate governance index. A key contribution is to examine the voluntary adoption of corporate governance guidelines under an almost "no listing requirements" environment in Brazil over a reasonable time span while most studies use cross-section samples over one or a few years. This is probably one of the few papers to investigate the impact of ownership structure on the quality of corporate governance practices segregating control and cash flow rights. Also, we perform regression analyses employing a robust panel-data GMM-based procedure that accounts for the main sources of endogeneity associated with our empirical design. Our data shows that overall firm-level corporate governance quality is steadily improving but is still low and that heterogeneity has increased during the sample period. Voluntarily joining stricter listing requirements, either by cross-listing in the US or by joining Bovespa's New Market, is positively associated with firm-level corporate governance quality. We found no clear evidence of the influence of other potential determinants, such as growth perspectives, firm size, firm value, and ownership structure, and we doubt the methodological reliability of previous findings suggesting that there is a causal relationship from value and ownership to corporate governance practices.