The impact of foreign owership and board membership on the performance of domestic banks: evidence from Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Guerreiro, Luís Miguel Pires
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/1400
• topic: Foreign ownership; Board ownership; Corporate governance

This study examines the effect of foreign ownership and board membership on the performance of domestic banks in Portugal, employing ordinary least-square and two-stage least-square regression analysis. The findings reveal a negative relationship between foreign ownership and bank costs. Foreign ownership implies a reduction in total costs of 4.1% while operating costs decline 1.1%. For each unit of foreign equity total costs go down 11.7% and operational costs fall 3.4%. Evidence also indicates that foreign board members introduce improvements in organizational structure and operational efficiency, according to the significant and negative relationship with operating costs. Furthermore, our results suggest that domestic banks’ dependence on traditional banking areas of business is reduced due to foreign board members’ experienced insights and understanding of markets and competition beyond the local environment. Foreign board membership reduces the interest margin on average 0.7% and increases the non-interest margin 0.4%. A 1% increase in the number of foreign board members reduces the net interest margin by 2.9%. A CEO with foreign nationality lowers the interest margin by 6.0%. Additionally, foreign directors with major influence on the board seem to be more willing to address the deterioration of asset quality by promoting the adoption of more prudent practices in lending and management of credit risk, which leads to higher levels of provisions for credit losses. These findings indicate that foreign ownership and board membership can play an important role in importing sophisticated managerial practices that can improve the performance of domestic banks. Indeed, the adoption of a global corporate governance system can improve bank performance, especially in countries in their early stages of financial development.