Corporate Governance and Performance of Banks Listed in B3 in an Economic Crisis Environment

By moving significant resources, the banking sector tends to attract numerous stakeholders, a fact that requires control and risk mitigation mechanisms. In this sense, corporate governance can improve relationships of trust and contribute to the performance of banks. The study aims to analyze the influence of corporate governance (CG) on the economic and financial performance of the banks listed in B3, compared in an environment with and without an economic crisis. For this, a quantitative research was carried out with secondary data. The theoretical foundation is based on the agency conflict defined by Jensen and Meckling (1976). As a performance measure, the efficiency scores were generated by the DEA technique, calculated by the normalized composite index, as proposed by Mello, Gomes, Meza and Leta (2008). Next, a panel regression was estimated, relating performance to three dummies associated with CG and an economic crisis. The results point to a significant but negative relationship between CG and performance and a non-significant relation between performance and crisis, as well as a significant relationship between CG and crisis. The main contribution of the study was to establish, for the banking sector, the relationship between corporate governance, performance and economic crisis in Brazil.