THE IMPACT OF BOARD DIVERSITY ON FIRM VALUE: THE CASE OF TURKEY

There is a special attention to corporate governance during to past 10 years in the wake of financial failures in world’s leading companies. Corporate governance mechanisms are affected by various internal and external factors, therefore they are divided into two categories: internal corporate governance mechanisms and external corporate mechanisms. Market forces and legislative regulations can be count as external corporate governance practices while board of directors and ownership structure are classified in internal corporate governance practices. The study aims to investigate the impact of board structure that is one of the internal corporate mechanism on firm value. In this direction, 2010-2015 data in balance sheets, annual reports and official reports of ordinary general meeting which belongs to 67 BIST 100 companies are employed. While percentage of female directors, percentage of independent directors and percentage of foreign directors are used for measurement of board diversity, Tobin’s Q is employed for measurement of firm value. In addition, natural logarithm of number of directors and natural logarithm of total assets are employed as control variables. Results reveal that there is positive and statistically significant relation between firm value and percentage of foreign directors and percentage of independent directors. Besides, there is no statistically significant relation found between percentage of women directors and Tobin’s