Our findings suggest that board structure is critical
to the performance of firms in Hong Kong (HK).
These results are consistent with those from the CG
literature indicating that better CG is associated with
higher firm value. We show that a more independent
board structure is related to higher firm value, which
suggests that the investors are willing to pay more for
better board structure. The premium is economically
significant. The coefficient of the board structure
index suggests that a one-SD increase of the board
structure index increase the firm value by 0.0659,
equals about 7.24% (10.63%) of the mean (median).
When the board structure index increases from the
25th percentile to the 75th percentile, the firm value
increase by 0.1048, which is about 11.52% (16.91%)
of mean (median) of the average firm value. Our
findings also show that board structure impacts firm
value the most among the four major internal CG
mechanisms. We then compare PCA constructed
indices with simple constructed indices, and find that
the impact of PCA indices on firm value is larger than
that of the corresponding simple indices. These
results suggest that PCA can effectively capture
more commonality and therefore more clearly identify
the impact of the CG index on firm value.