A Study of the Relationship between E-voting, Foreign ownership & Board Composition: Evidence of Taiwan Listed Companies

• Main Authors: Chung-Pang Hung, 洪仲邦
• Other Authors: Kuo-Pin Yang
• Format: Others
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/cbh394

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 國際企業學系 === 104 === Stockholder annual meeting has been one of the central issues of corporate governance for decades. The major problems of stockholder annual meetings include highly concentrated dates, low participation of disperse stockholders, proxy mechanism, and inefficient voting procedures, among others. To solve these problems, Taiwanese government has mandated a new practice of e-voting practice in stockholder annual meetings since 2012, which is partially and incrementally applied to a range of listed companies. Based on the agency theory, this study aims to investigate the question of whether the adoption of e-voting practice increases foreign ownership, which, in turn, affects the composition of board directors. Three allied hypotheses are proposed with regard to the relationships between the e-voting, foreign ownership, and board composition. This study uses 834 Taiwanese listed companies covering the period between 2013 and 2015 as the sample to test the hypotheses. The empirical results show that the adoption of e-voting practice is positively correlated to foreign ownership, which subsequently affects board composition, with more seats (in percentage) of independent directors and less seats (in percentage) of internal directors and seats controlled by ultimate controlling shareholders. In addition to the mediating mechanism of foreign ownership, e-voting practice also has a direct effect on board composition. The findings of the study support the three hypotheses proposed, contribute to the debate of the literature of corporate governance, and suggest important implications for governance practice.