International Journal of Accounting Research

Abstract

Does Corporate Governance Matter? Evidence from New Chinese Corporate Governance Disclosures

Zabihollah Rezaee, Huili Zhang, Huan Dou and Minghua Gao

This paper examines the association between corporate governance, financial distress risk, and firm financial and market performance by using the Corporate Governance in Finance (CGF) Index developed for Chinese firms. We find that the CGF Index is significantly negatively associated with financial distress risk measured by the Zmijewski-score, O-score, and Z-score. We also find that accounting and market performance measures are significantly positively related to the CGF Index. Finally, for the short-window cumulative abnormal returns (CAR), we find that, around the release of CGF Index, the CAR of firms with lower scores are significantly negative, while that of firms with higher CGF Index scores are not significant. Our results provide further support for the important role of corporate governance effectiveness in the financial reporting process in the emerging markets.