On the shareholders'composition of the company and the governance mechanisms of the firm, can this contribute to the firm performance (including the capacity to attract capital and bank allowances)?

This paper investigates whether there is any relationship between ownership characteristics and the goodness of a firm's corporate governance, its capability to attract financial resources and its merit of credit. At the same time, the paper investigates whether capital structure decisions are influenced by corporate governance mechanisms. Ten different Developed Countries are considered. We found out that: i) despite some occasional similarities in terms of corporate governance and ownership characteristics among the ten countries included in our sample, still many differences exists; ii) at Country level of analysis, a correspondence is found between better characteristics of the corporate governance and a stronger corporate performance, increasing their capability of attracting financial resources, and improving their merit of credit; iii) nevertheless, at individual firm level, corporate governance and ownership characteristics do not have a significant impact of firms' performance and their merit of credit; iv) capital structure decisions are influenced by the presence of a manager in the ownership structure and board of directors size. This let us conclude that ownership characteristics influence corporate governance standing, but the latter is not strong enough to influence firms' performance and merit of credit.