In this paper, we investigate the relation between firm-level corporate governance and firm
value based on a large and previously unused dataset from Governance Metrics International
(GMI) comprising 6663 firm-year observations from 22 developed countries over the period
from 2003 to 2007. Based on a set of 64 individual governance attributes we construct two
alternative additive corporate governance indices with equal weights attributed to the
governance attributes and one index derived from a principal component analysis. For all three
indices we find a strong and positive relation between firm-level corporate governance and
firm valuation. In addition, we investigate the value relevance of governance attributes that
document the companies' social behavior. Regardless of whether these attributes are
considered individually or aggregated into indices, and even when “standard” corporate
governance attributes are controlled for, they exhibit a positive and significant effect on firm
value. Our findings are robust to alternative calculation procedures for the corporate
governance indices and to alternative estimation techniques