The composition of board of directors and performance: Impact of the political experience after the Tunisian revolution

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of directors' political experience, acquired on the financial performance of listed companies, after the Tunisian revolution of 2011. We also emphasize the directors' strategic experience, and the board of directors' demographic and structural characteristics. Our data are based on a sample of 22 Tunisian companies listed on the Tunisian stock exchange during the period 2012 to 2018. This period is characterized by a high corruption. We use two different regression models to examine the impact of the directors' political experience on the firm's performance. Especially, two measures of the financial performance, namely the ROE and the Tobin's Q are considered. The results show that political experience is insignificant when considering the ROE while it has a negative impact on performance when it is measured by the Tobin's Q. Nevertheless, strategic experience, the presence of women and the frequency of meetings moderate this negative impact and increase performance.