The Effect of Corporate Governance on Corporate Performance in the Financial Industry in Nigeria

The business environment in which the financial industry operates is full of uncertainty and limitations. The inability of some firms in this sector to produce capable management that can guide the interests of shareholders in the light of ethics and values has generated frequent cases of business downturn. This has compelled the industry to adopt the strategy of corporate governance which hinges on the intellectual honesty of directors and management to promote transparency, equity, and accountability, and provide leadership that will guide the industry in the right direction. The major objective of this paper is to ascertain whether corporate governance is a strategy for corporate performance. The study made use of both primary and secondary sources of data. The survey research method and the data analysis techniques comprised of simple percentages and chi-square derived from Kendal coefficient. It discovered that corporate governance is a strategy for corporate performance and the financial sector has failed to improve their performance using this strategy. It was recommended that the regulatory agencies should constantly review the acts that ensure good corporate governance and embark on constant monitoring in order to sanction any defaulting bank.     

理解治理多样性：一种国家治理的新科学

现代社会及其公共事务的复杂性对治理构成了严峻的挑战。为了应对公共事务的复杂性、多规模性、嵌套性和动态性,很多研究者提出了不同的治理理论,并且都试图寻找“治理万能药”,以一种治理方式适用所有情景。然而人类要真正解决所面临的公共事务治理难题,就需要实现“认识论哲学”的转型,以“多样性”的思维范式取代“单一性”思维范式,按照“治理多样性”的新范式来重构治理体制“。治理多样性”分析范式是一种治理的新科学,其分析框架主要包括“行动者、机制、物品属性、结构和绩效”等要素,核心是公共事务与治理系统的有效匹配,实现基于“多行动者——多机制——多属性——多结构——多目标”的治理,多样性是其内在逻辑。治理本身是一个复杂演进和相互调适的过程“。治理多样性”要应用于治理实践,就需要发展出“诊断、设计和学习模型”。     

The Impact of Corporate Governance in the Financial Performance of Islamic Banks： Evidence From the GCC Region

Through this paper, the author seeks to determine the and financial performance of Islamic banks, where we relationship between the variables of corporate governance dealt the corporate governance in the banking sector, where increasing the importance of corporate governance, due to their special nature, as the bankruptcy of banks not only affects the relevant parties from customers, depositors, and lenders, but also affects financial stability and then the economy as a whole. We dealt with the specificity of governance in Islamic banks, which face double governance： Anglo-Saxon Governance System and Islamic Governance System. The author measures the impact of corporate governance variables on financial performance through an empirical study on a sample of Islamic banks during the period of 2005-2012 in the GCC （Gulf Cooperation Council） region. The study has found that there is a very strong relationship between the variables of governance and financial performance of Islamic banks, where there is a positive relationship between return on assets （ROA） and the composition of the board of directors, the size of the board of directors, the number of committees in the council, as well as the number of members of the Shariah Supervisory Board （SSB）, while it is clear that there is a negative relationship between ROA and concentration ownership variable.     

The hijacking of a new corporate form? Benefit corporations and corporate personhood

Benefit corporations are a new type of corporate entity developed to remedy antisocial corporate behaviour by enabling mission-driven investors, managers and entrepreneurs to prioritize social values and contest the idea that profits are the only and best measure of corporate performance. To resocialize the corporate entity, the benefit corporation movement built enabling discourses and evaluation practices into the dominant model of corporate governance, shareholder value ideology. These discourses and practices expand both the purpose of the corporate entity and shareholders’ power to enforce that purpose. However, this paper argues that the effort to ‘re-embed’ the corporate entity by making it subject to non-economic claims expands the scope of corporate personhood and that doing so within extant power relations of the firm opens the door to alternative projects that undermine the benefit corporation movement's goal of fostering corporate social responsibility.     

Diffusion of Corporate Risk‐Management Characteristics: Perspectives of Chief Audit Executives through a Survey Approach

This study examines how corporate risk‐management characteristics in Australian public universities have diffused under an environment of conflicting management cultures. The findings reveal that corporate risk‐management characteristics have diffused in a pluralist form to satisfy stakeholders of different management approaches across its governance levels as opposed to a unilateral form aligned to the corporate approach. The accepted practice of this adapted version challenges the existing notion that the adoption of corporate control processes in the public sector is problematic, and provides insights into the emergence of a hybrid control process to address the needs of multiple stakeholders. These findings have policy implications for defining a new hybrid governance‐control paradigm for the public sector as an alternative to the corporate‐influenced control paradigm, and provide avenues for further research to confirm the phenomenon with other corporate control processes, public‐sector entities, and if so its impact on effective governance.     

Science Use in Regulatory Impact Analysis: The Effects of Political Attention and Controversy

Scholars, policy makers, and research sponsors have long sought to understand the conditions under which scientific research is used in the policy‐making process. Recent research has identified a resource that can be used to trace the use of science across time and many policy domains. U.S. federal agencies are mandated by executive order to justify all economically significant regulations by regulatory impact analyses (RIAs), in which they present evidence of the scientific underpinnings and consequences of the proposed rule. To gain new insight into when and how regulators invoke science in their policy justifications, we ask: does the political attention and controversy surrounding a regulation affect the extent to which science is utilized in RIAs? We examine scientific citation activity in all 101 economically significant RIAs from 2008 to 2012 and evaluate the effects of attention—from the public, policy elites, and the media—on the degree of science use in RIAs. Our main finding is that regulators draw more heavily on scientific research when justifying rules subject to a high degree of attention from outside actors. These findings suggest that scientific research plays an important role in the justification of regulations, especially those that are highly salient to the public and other policy actors.     

Can the hidden hand of the market be an effective and legitimate regulator? The case of animal welfare under a labeling for consumer choice policy approach

In Australia, labeling for consumer choice, rather than higher government regulation, has become an important strand of the policy approach to addressing food animal welfare. This paper illustrates the usefulness of “regulatory network analysis” to uncover the potentials and limitations of market‐based governance to address contentious yet significant issues like animal welfare. We analyzed the content of newspaper articles from major Australian newspapers and official policy documents between 1990 and 2014 to show how the regulatory network influenced the framing of the regulatory problem, and the capacity and legitimacy of different regulatory actors at three “flashpoints” of decisionmaking about layer hen welfare in egg production. We suggest that the government policy of offering consumers the choice to buy cage free in the market allowed large‐scale industry to continue the egg laying business as usual with incremental innovation and adjustment. These incremental improvements only apply to the 20 percent or so of hens producing “free‐range” eggs. We conclude with a discussion of when and how labeling for consumer choice might create markets and public discourses that make possible more effective and legitimate regulation of issues such as layer hen welfare.     

The Current Status and Future Direction of Nanotechnology Regulations: A View from Nano‐scientists

This article presents an up‐to‐date view of leading U.S. nanoscientists' perceptions about the regulation of nanotechnology. Our analysis draws from the results of a 2011 mail survey with 444 of the most prolific nanoscientists in the United States to explore their perceptions about existing nanotech policies, the development of new nanotech policies, and mandatory policies about the implementation of safe lab practices for federally funded nanoresearch. In addition to exploring the scientists' perceptions about these pressing policy issues, we also test relationships between their perceptions about regulation and control variables such as gender, disciplinary affiliation, and political ideology. Last, the results of the 2011 data collection are compared with a similar mail survey that was conducted in 2007 with leading U.S. nanoscientists to explore any changes over the four‐year time period in scientists' perceptions about nanotechnology policy making, and governmental involvement in nanotechnology research.     

Big Data and U.S. Public Policy

This paper examines the growing recognition of the phenomenon called “Big Data” and the policy implications it poses. It is argued that a core policy issue is personal and organizational privacy. At the same time there is a belief that analysis of “Big Data” offers potentially to provide public sector policy makers with extensive new information that would inform policy at unprecedentedly detailed levels. Despite this potential to improve the policy‐making process data often contain individual identifiable information that would negatively impact American core values such as privacy. This makes the use of these data almost impossible. The paper recognizes that there may be a way to strip individual data from Big Data sets thereby making their analysis more policy useful. This approach is not at this time technically feasible but research is ongoing.