COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACCOUNTING AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE OF COMPANIES WITH GOOD CORPORATE GOVERNANCE PRACTICES IN BRAZIL

This article aims to compare the accounting and financial performance of companies with good corporate governance practices and others without this profile, by applying the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the information of the electric distribution sector in Brazil from 2005 - 2007. In order to meet this goal, it was used information about profitability, profit margin, asset turnover, liquidity, debt and capitalization obtained from the Exame-FIPECAFI database. In general, the comparison between the average performance of these two groups, using the Mann-Whitney nonparametric test, with significance level of 5 %, shows that companies with best practices of corporate governance have statistically superior accounting and financial performance in the year 2005 and in their average performance during the analysis period. However, for 2006 e 2007 the performance of the two groups is statistically equal in the level of 5 %. This only partially supports the indications of superiority of performance presented in the literature of corporate governance.