The Effect of Corporate Governance on the Firms’ Financial Performance through the Mediating Variable of Transparency Using the Meta-Analysis Method

The ultimate goal of corporate governance is to achieve the promotion of fairness, transparency, accountability, and compliance with the rights of shareholders in companies and economic enterprises. However, there are doubts about its success rate in achieving the aforementioned goals. The disclosure of more and periodic information will reduce the cost of capital and the cost of transactions, reduce the error in profit forecasts, or demand more than usual for a company's bonds. Managers can pursue the goal of maximizing shareholders' wealth by managing variables (such as transparency) in the financial structure. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of corporate governance on the financial performance of companies using the mediating variable of transparency. In this study, using a meta-analysis approach, the impact of transparency on corporate governance and its effect on financial performance is investigated. A hypothesis about the effect of corporate governance on the mediating variable of transparency and a hypothesis about the effect of the mentioned variable on financial performance were proposed and 20 articles including a total of 81 effect sizes (of type r) whose publication dates were between 2003 and 2018 were studied. If the effect size was divergent, the random effects method was used, and for convergent cases, the fixed effects method was used to calculate the effect size. In addition to testing each hypothesis, after determining the size of the cumulative effect, a robustness test was performed and analyzed for each hypothesis. The results indicated that corporate governance has no effect on transparency, but the robustness test showed that the mechanisms of corporate governance, including the independence of the board of directors, and the dual role of the CEO and the audit committee, have a significant effect on transparency. In addition, the results show the significant impact of transparency on financial performance.

In recent years, the discussion of corporate governance has become one of the topics of professional and scientific research. In previous studies, the direct impact of corporate governance on the company's financial performance has been measured (Che Haat et al., 2008; Mardnly et al., 2018; Saidat et al., 2019). Corporate governance is expected to improve financial performance not only directly but also through the mediating effect of transparency. Corporate governance may affect the level of corporate disclosure, especially when the board of directors manages the information disclosed in annual reports (Gibbins et al., 1990). Centralized decision-making power (such as the same role of the CEO and the chairman of the board of directors) hinders the possibility of monitoring various aspects, including disclosure policies, due to the threat to the independence of the board of directors (Carver, 1990; Fama & Jensen, 1983). A good corporate governance system requires periodic, transparent, and comparable information reporting, especially information related to financial, managerial, and ownership issues of the company. Transparency, in terms of its role in reducing information asymmetry, is the preferred area for shareholders to control managers because it reduces risk and consequently improves performance. Therefore, the first hypothesis was formulated as follows:Hypothesis 1: Corporate governance affects the transparency of firms.
Reducing information asymmetry from the perspective of agency theory reduces the tendency to selfishness, and from the perspective of investment, it reduces risk and expected return. Both of these aspects make analysts expect that information disclosure can improve the firm's financial performance. Therefore, a high level of transparency has a positive effect on the company's performance. Accordingly, information disclosure such as periodical reports can reduce capital costs and information asymmetry (Lang & Lundholm, 1999). Therefore, the second hypothesis was formulated as follows:Hypothesis 2: Transparency has an effect on the financial performance of economic enterprises.

After reviewing various scientific sources, seven steps were selected for the meta-analysis (Glass et al., 1981; Hunter & Schmidt, 2004; Kohli & Devaraj, 2003; Rosenthal, 2001). The first step is to determine the thematic framework. The second step is to specify the keywords, determine the databases and search for studies, the third step is to screen the searched articles according to one of the research hypotheses, to report the effect size and the type of correlational study. The fourth step is to collect the data from the searched articles. The fifth step was to calculate the effect size for each member of the sample (each test). The sixth step was to calculate the common effect size for each hypothesis. Finally, in the seventh step, the homogeneity of the effect size was calculated for each hypothesis (each group of effect sizes).
If the within-group effect sizes are convergent (zero variance hypothesis is not rejected), it means that there is a common effect size that all sample tests have measured; and the fixed effects method is used to calculate the cumulative effect size. If the effect sizes within the group are divergent (zero variance hypothesis is rejected), it means that there are different effect sizes, one of which has been calculated in each sample of the tests; and the random effects method was used to calculate the cumulative effect size.

In this section, the robustness tests performed to test the hypotheses and comment on the confirmation or disconfirmation of each of the hypotheses. In both hypotheses, the common effect size is divergent, that is, it is related to a group of different effect sizes with high deviation, and the random effects method is the basis for calculating the common effect size. The results indicated the rejection of the null hypothesis related to the second hypothesis. In other words, the effect of transparency on financial performance is confirmed, but the effect of corporate governance on transparency is rejected. The robustness test in the first hypothesis shows the lack of influence of corporate governance on transparency in developed and developing countries. There is no significant relationship between corporate governance and transparency in different time periods, except for the years 2005-2009. The results show that there is a significant relationship between the independent variable of the board of directors and transparency. The CEO duality variable has a negative and significant effect, board size has a positive and significant effect at the 5% level, and the audit committee has a positive and significant effect on transparency. The indicators of concentration of ownership, the number of board meetings, and gender diversity in the board of directors have not been tested because the sample number is less than 5.
In the validation of the second hypothesis, the results show no significant effect between transparency and financial performance in developed countries. In the time interval of 2015-2019, there is a significant and positive effect between transparency and financial performance, and the results of other periods have not been tested because the number of samples is less than 5. In the financial performance section, a significant and positive effect was observed between transparency and ROA and ROE. No significant effect was found between transparency and Tobin's Q. The results of other indicators were not tested because the number of samples was less than 5.

The main purpose of this study is to meta-analyze the indirect effect of corporate governance on the financial performance of companies using the mediating variable of transparency. In the first hypothesis, the relationship between transparency and corporate governance was tested. The results of the current study did not show a significant effect between corporate governance and transparency due to the overlap of various corporate governance indicators. The study of various indicators of corporate governance shows a significant and positive relationship between the independence of the board of directors and transparency, the audit committee and transparency, and a significant and negative relationship between the duality of the CEO and transparency. In the second hypothesis, the relationship between transparency and financial performance has been tested. The results show a significant and positive impact on the company's financial performance. The robustness test shows that this effect is quite evident in the studies studied in recent years. The high level of information disclosure helps the stakeholders in improving the quality of their decision-making.
The above results, like any other research, may be criticized due to the researchers’ limited access to all published empirical studies, the time limit of studying past articles and looking at them retrospectively, the meta-analytic nature of this study, and the dependence on meta-analysis results on past experimental studies. However, due to the wide range of companies that support the results, the validity of the empirical studies collected and the robustness check performed are robust enough to be the basis for decision-making and policy-making for managers, policymakers, and investors. Therefore, it is suggested to the shareholders to emphasize the independence of the board of directors and the audit committee to improve the financial performance, through the index of the audit committee, control the level of transparency, and provide the basis for the improvement of the financial performance, through the indicators of the independence of the board of directors and the duality of the CEO to create the context of increasing the transparency of the company and thus improving the financial performance, pay enough attention to the concentration of ownership, the duality of the CEO, the size of the board of directors, and the number of board meetings in the development of the corporate governance system because it is a good basis for optimizing transparency and improving financial performance.