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Ethics and Sustainability in Accounting and Finance, Volume I pp 247–272Cite as

Measuring the Quality of Codes of Conduct in Greek Listed Companies

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Abstract

Even though there has been an increasing interest by scholars regarding the importance of corporate codes of conduct (COC) over the last decades, there has also been a rarity of research examining the quality of these codes. This study develops a framework and evaluates the intrinsic quality of such codes in the Greek context. Using data on 22 Greek companies listed on Athens Stock Exchange and according to the COC collected from their Web sites, we found that the average “conduct” rating is 66.51% under the dichotomous method and 63.93% under the PC unweighted method, with this difference being statistically significant. Moreover, we present evidence that the quality is higher in larger companies regardless of the used method for items weighing. All in all, our findings have exciting implications for academics and practitioners.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A plethora of scandals have been revealed in the capital market (for more, see Nerantzidis and Filos 2014: 286).

  2. 2.

    For this sample, we at first ranked the companies from the higher firm size (based on their total assets) to the lower and we then randomly choose 10 (using excel spreadsheets to produce random numbers).

  3. 3.

    In this test, the null hypothesis H0 is that the variable of the quality scores is normally distributed.

  4. 4.

    In this test, the null hypothesis H0 is that there is no difference between the scores of the dichotomous and PC approach and we reject or accept this hypothesis in a 95% confidence interval.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hellenic Open University, Patra, Greece

    Michail Nerantzidis

  2. Department of Public Administration, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece

    Anastasios Tsamis

Authors
  1. Michail Nerantzidis
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  2. Anastasios Tsamis
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Correspondence to Michail Nerantzidis .

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  1. Trakya University, Balkan Yerleşkesi, Edirne, Turkey

    Kıymet Tunca Çalıyurt

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Nerantzidis, M., Tsamis, A. (2019). Measuring the Quality of Codes of Conduct in Greek Listed Companies. In: Çalıyurt, K. (eds) Ethics and Sustainability in Accounting and Finance, Volume I. Accounting, Finance, Sustainability, Governance & Fraud: Theory and Application. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3203-6_14

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