A series of financial collapses in the UK in the late 1980s resulted in public concem about failures in the governance of companies, leading to the Cadbury Report (1992). However those scandals have not resulted in much attention being paid to the corporate govemance characteristics of failed firms in the empirical analysis. This thesis uses a dynamic view to extend existing knowledge of corporate govemance mechanisms in the context of corporate failure in the UK. The purpose of this thesis is to empirically examine the effects of static and dynamic governance characteristics on corporate failure, and to investigate the telationships between changes in govemance mechanisms and changes in performance prior to failure.