Abstract
Corporate failures and financial scandals have shaken the corporate world and sparked a global conversation about the need for good corporate governance. Specifically, the study evaluated the effect of board characteristics on financial performance of selected industrial goods companies in Nigeria. The study used secondary data that sourced from the yearly financial reports of the thirteen industrial goods companies that were sampled for the study, which covered the ten-year period from 2011 to 2020. To accomplish the study’s objective, the data were examined using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings of Panel regression reported that the board size and board gender diversity have a positive and significant effect on the accounting-based measure of performance of industrial firms. While in the case of market-based measure of performance, board independence, board gender diversity and audit committee size are positive and statistically significant. The study concluded that there is a positive and significant relationship of board characteristics, audit committee size with Return on Asset (ROA) and Tobins Q for industrial firms. It is therefore recommended that industrial firms in the country should put in place strict evaluation mechanism to identify the most appropriate board characteristics that will help to sustain improved performance at all time and this evaluation mechanism should be design to factor in dynamic adjustment that might be inherent in the patterns of influence of board structure on performance.
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