English abstract
This study attempted to examine the association between two important committees of corporate governance practice namely, audit committee characteristics and executive committee characteristics, and firm performance. The data used comprised of non-financial companies listed in Muscat Security Market (MSM) through 2011 and 2012. Based on widely existing literature that studied the relationship between corporate governance and firm performance, studies that investigated the role of executive committee with firm performance are few and far between and hence, the main aim of this study is to discover this relation. Therefore, this study is an attempt to fill the gap in literature by exploring these new measures and contributing to a rich body of existing literature. The outcome of this study revealed a positive relationship between audit committee size (ACSIZE), audit committee independence (ACINDE) and executive committee size (ECSIZE) and firm performance but not significant. In addition, the association between audit committee meeting (ACMEETIN), executive committee independence (ECINDE) and executive committee meeting (ECMEETIN) and firm performance was negative but not significant. The findings found the relationship between firm size (FIRMSIZE) and firm performance to be positively significant while the relationship between leverage (LEVERAG) and firm performance was found to be negatively significant. Finally, this study discusses the results and provides limitation and recommendations towards the end.
