Corporate Governance and Financial Performance of Listed Healthcare Sector Companies in Nigeria

The Healthcare sector companies are veritable investment companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The study aimed to investigate the effect of corporate governance and financial performance of listed healthcare sector companies in Nigeria. It employed the ex-post facto research design and equally used secondary data generated from the annual report and accounts of all eight (8) sampled listed healthcare sector companies in Nigeria from 2008 to 2019. The sample size was arrived at by using a purposive sampling technique. The study analysed the data using least square, descriptive and covariance techniques. It adopted Tobin-Q as a measure for firm financial performance, whereas corporate governance variables include board size, board independence and managerial ownership. From the empirical results, the study concludes that there are some level of significance between financial performance and two out of the three corporate governance variables (board independence and managerial ownership). However, the correlation result shows no relationship among the variables examined. The study, therefore, recommends that companies in the healthcare sector should as a matter of necessity embrace complete compliance to corporate governance structure in order to attract the tremendous benefits and improve corporate financial performance therein. This could be done simultaneously with the governance structure at the district, state or hospital level to achieve greater performance. More so, further studies could examine other corporate governance variables together with the already examined variables in this study. Other financial performance variable could also be employed to ascertain any relation or significance among them for the healthcare sector companies.