الفهرس 
chapter 1: General form workOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The aim of this research is to investigate the role of corporate governance in reducing agency costs and the cost of equity capital for Egyptian companies. To achieve the research objectives, the research has been organized as follows.
The first chapter shed the light on the general framework of research which includes an introduction to the research and the research problem that can be summarized in the following two questions:
1. Does Corporate Governance Reduce Agency Costs?
2. Does Corporate Governance Reduce the Cost of Equity Capital?
Moreover first chapter highlighted the research importance globally and locally. First, globally after the financial crisis there has been a global trend toward enforcing governance mechanisms as well as regulations in order to protect shareholders’ interests. Second, locally the importance of this research is derived from the current national social, economic, and political condition. As the Egyptian revolution came with the promise of major social, economic, and political reform. Thus, great attention is expected to be directed towards country governance as well as corporate laws and governance. In addition, the research adds to the Egyptian empirical literature on corporate governance by providing useful insights into how corporate governance mechanisms can help to mitigate agency related problems and reduce the cost of equity capital.
Chapter two presented an overview of corporate governance based on the previous discussions that are derived from corporate governance literature and in line with the agency perspective of corporate governance adopted by this research. The chapter ended up by defining corporate governance as a mechanism for monitoring the actions and decisions of managers, as well as aligning the interests among various stakeholders, specifically, managers and shareholders. In addition the chapter discussed some corporate governance mechanisms, such as; financial information quality, managerial ownership, board independence, CEO/Chairperson duality, and a big four external auditor, and discussed how these mechanisms are expected to reduce both agency costs and the cost of equity capital. Furthermore, the chapter provided a theoretical framework of agency costs and reviewed some of the most common proxies of agency costs used in the literature. Such proxies include; debt to asset ratio, asset liquidity ratio, asset utilization ratio, and ratio of selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses to sales. Finally, the chapter shed the light on the theoretical framework of the cost of equity capital and reviewed some of the most common approaches used to estimate the cost of equity capital in the accounting literature.