Corporate Governance and Firms’ Performance: Evidence from Quoted Firms on the Nigerian Stock Exchange

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate governance and firms’ performance of listed firm in the Nigerian stock exchange between 2012 and 2017. Consequently, data were extracted from 40 companies out of 169 companies, which are listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange as at 2018 169. Dynamic ordinary least square was adopted to analyze the objective of study. The principal findings that originate from this study are that board independence, gender diversity and managerial ownership have a positive relationship with firms’ performance. These variables improved the return on asset and the return on equity of the selected firms. Therefore, it could be concluded from this study that corporate governance improves the performance of the listed firms on the Nigerian stock exchange. However, due to the findings that emerged in this study, this paper makes the following vital policy recommendations for the policy makers, corporate firms, institution regulators and future researchers. The board independence of the listed firms in the Nigerian stock exchange should be encouraged by increasing the percentage of independent directors in these firms. Similarly, there should be a balance in the inclusion of males and female with effective managerial ownership among the board of directors in the listed firms in the Nigerian stock exchange.