Corporate Governance is an important topic that has been given a great deal of attention the last decade and the attention has increased even more with the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The severe financial and economic crisis has worsened the relationship between shareholders and corporations, including banks, as well as between the executive management and the board of directors. There is a need to rebuild the trust between these actors and Corporate Governance is considered to be a helpful tool in order to achieve this. A mean that is used within Corporate Governance to protect shareholders in the financial market is the use of independent directors as a monitoring device for the executive management. Independent directors are considered to play an important role on boards and are preventing inside directors from abusing their power in hazardous ways. The efficiency of independent directors has however shown to differ between industries. The banking industry in particular stands out in comparison to non-financial firms. It is vital that independent directors are provided with the right expertise that is needed to fundamentally understand the complex industry of banks, and there is a risk that these directors lack this kind of knowledge which makes their presence inefficient. The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether there have been any changes in the number of independent board members in four Swedish banks within the time period of 2001-2010. The banks that are included in this study are Handelsbanken, Nordea, SEB and Swedbank. Variables that are covered in the study are, except for number of independent board members in respect to the bank and major shareholders, the number of executives on the boards, the gender distribution, average age and average tenure of the independent board members. The result shows that there has been an increase in the number of independent board members within the investigated time period. The banks are complying with guidelines concerning board independence that are included in various recommendations provided by both the European Commission as well as the Swedish Corporate Governance Board.

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The objective of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the corporate governance of investor trust companies in Taiwan and the performance of their mutual funds. Consider the feasibility of data collection, the data from the mother company of those investor trusts which are listed or publicly-held companies have been used instead in this study. There are 17 companies and 334 mutual funds in total. For the corporate governance indicators, the constituent of the corporate boards, the common stock holdings, and the level of information transparency are measured as the independent variable. For the performance of mutual funds, the return of mutual funds, the Jensen Performance Index, the excess return of Fama and French¡¦s Three Factor Model, the excess return of Carhart¡¦s Four Factor Model, and the excess return under those models¡¦ with timing factor are measured as the dependent variables. The market value of the companies and the timing of financial crisis are measured as the control variables. The statistics and the regression are applied to evaluate the relationship among them. The results are as follows: 1.After the financial crisis, the return of mutual funds has significantly decreased. 2.The scale of the corporate boards, and the sock-holding percentage of major shareholders have significantly lower down the performance of mutual funds. These results support Jensen (1993)¡¦s and Salman (1993)¡¥s researches because the more of the directors and the higher of the stock-holding percentage of major shareholders, the more difficult to have agreements for the company to follow. The reason why it is different from the concept that the sock-holding percentage of major shareholders has significantly increased the performance of the company could be the index this research measured is the performance of the company¡¦s products, mutual funds, not the performance of the companies. 3.The rate of outside independent directors, the stock-holding percentage of executive, the stock-holding percentage of corporate directors, and the rank of information transparency have significantly increased the performance of mutual funds.

Abstract At present Taiwan is leading in the global Wafer OEM and ODM industries, and the outstanding accomplishment is growing constantly. Besides, due to the close relation between the specialized semiconductor packaging/test industries and the Wafer OEM industries, the growth rate was also similar to the Wafer OEM industries. The highly concentrated global packaging industries are gradually moving towards two-side development, big or small. Large plants, operated by group management and under shared resources, have the advantages in price negotiation and cost controls. Corporation A and B are two of the top domestic packaging/test manufacturers. At the same time, they also are No. 1 and 3 of the global specialty packaging factories. The multitudinous small factories cannot compete with these two companies on scale and growth rate. Corporation A and B still maintain the competitive advantages. Corporation C was also one of the top three packaging/test plants in the 2000s. However, in the recent years, the company did not perform as well as the overall economy. The firm has experienced massive business losses, drastic price drop in its stock. Its output was far behind the top two plants. In 2004, it became the No. 4 manufacturer, behind Corporation F. After analyzing financial ratios and investments to subsidiaries of Corporation C, this article has discovered the main reasons as to why Corporation C has changed from its flourish past to present weakness. Besides the adverse impact of the poor investment environment, they made a mistake by expanding their fixed assets without careful evaluation so the depreciation expense was too high. Moreover, their oversea investments expanded the losses because of recession, large debt amount and interest, thereby leading to the increases in bankruptcy costs. This article also discovered the decision-making quality of Corporation C and offered the improvement with the viewpoint of the Corporate Governance.

On 18th Mar 2000, Mr. Chen, Shui-Bian in Democratic Progressive Party was elected to be the new president. Taiwan experienced the first powershift. However, many state-owned banks as well as some government-shared companies re-structured their board of directors continually. In the view of politics, the powershift will be normal in Taiwan in the future. So we try to survey the the effects of powershift towards re-elections of boards and firm performance of state-owned enterprises. We discover that the major reason why government wants to intervene the operations of companies is policy. If this kind of industry is regulated or monopolistic, the government will has stronger motives to intervene its operation. On the other hand, after being intervened by the government, the cumulative abnormal return declined significantly from the event day to thirty days later. Besides, the firm performance didn¡¦t improve significantly through the view of TobinQ, EPS and Market return. So we can say that this time of powershift didn¡¦t improve the poor condition of corporate and firm performance significantly. So Taiwan corporate governance should abandon the relationship-based economic model and stride to the talent-based model.

Humboldt-Univ., Diss.--Berlin, 2005.

Thesis ( Ph.D.) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Thesis ( Ph.D. ) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Zugl.: Regensburg, Univ., Diss., 2009

Zugl.: Saarbrücken, Univ., Diss., 2008