Abstract

The Board of Directors (BoD) as an internal mechanism of corporate governance is considered to be a very important means of control. Indeed, according to several studies, its effectiveness depends on several factors relating to BoD size, the independence of its members, the presence of an audit committee, gender diversity and BoD meetings. To see the influence of independent variables on the dependent variable financial performance (Return on Equity _ROE), we used econometric tests. After the pre-requisite tests, we adopted the random effects model, which was validated through testing. Our empirical validation was conducted on a sample of 30 Senegalese public utility companies over a period of 8 years (2004-2011). The results of the model show that at the 5% threshold, hypotheses H.1, H.2 and H.4 are rejected. On the other hand, H.3 is validated. H.5 was not tested because the audit committee variable was an exception. Our results gave sufficient information to the Senegalese authorities to make good decisions.

Key words: Board of Directors (BoD), financial performance, panel data, modeling.