Corporate governance and performance: empirical evidence from Italian airport industry

This paper empirically examines the degree of maturity of corporate governance of Italian airport companies, after about twenty years from the beginning of the reform aimed at the privatization of the industry. Two corporate governance issues are investigated: i) the development of different corporate governance models by different categories of airports; ii) the relationship between corporate governance models and the technical and financial performance of Italian airport companies. For this reason two indexes have been developed to capture two corporate governance features such as decision-making power concentration and alignment to best practices. Then the correlation of corporate governance indexes with the efficiency, measured by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology, is tested on a significant sample of Italian airports.