Corporate Governance and Market Value in Pakistan

Corporate Governance is the mechanism by which companies are managed and controlled in the best interest of the shareholders. In order to eliminate the agency problems and to strive for goal congruence between the corporate managers and shareholders, different codes of corporate governance have been developed keeping in view the legal, social and economic structure of a particular country. In Pakistan code of Corporate Governance 2003 was initially adopted which was revised and updated in the form of Code of Corporate Governance 2012. This research study focuses on the relationship between corporate governance and market valuation in order to confirm that those companies that employ good corporate governance mechanism are valued more than other non-complying companies. For this purpose, two measures of value i.e. Tobin Q and MVA have been used while corporate governance is measures through six variables i.e.Ratio of Executive directors to Total Directors (Re), Ratio of Independent Directors to Total Directors (Ri), Role duality (Rd), Ratio of Management Remuneration to Total Salaries (Rm), Number of Board Meetings (Dm) and Ownership concentration (Ow) along-with four control variables i.e. Size of the firm (Sz), Sales Growth (Sg), Leverage of firm (Lev) and Return on Assets (ROA). In order to determine the relationship between the two variables sample of companies included in KSE-100 index of Pakistan Stock Exchange have been selected while multiple regression technique and Pearson?s correlation is used for the purpose of analysis. The result of data analysis shows significant relationship of corporate governance measures with both Tobin Q and MVA, which is consistent with the previous studies. The findings of the study recommend adoption of corporate governance practices to the Governments Agencies, Policy makers and Corporate managers as it will result in enhancing profitability, growth, market value at microeconomic level while it with lead to greater market stability by enhancing investor?s confidence, development of corporate and financial markets, improving FDI and GDP growth at macroeconomic level. Pakistan is the major emerging market of South Asia and being strategic partner of China in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) it will be the center of major economic and corporate activity in the near future. However in order to attract potential corporate investors the corporate governance framework requires further restructuring and improvement while financial, legal and economic environment needs to strengthen along with development of physical infrastructure to obtain maximum economic gains from the CPEC projects.