Purpose - The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between corporate governance (CG) characteristics and performance (proxied by return on equity-ROE) of listed Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) in Nigeria for the period 2012-2016.The concept of CG has become an issue of great concern to various stakeholders due to various corporate fiascos in several economies.In the same vein, this issue of corporate failures has likewise occurred in Nigeria due to ineffective application of corporate governance, where corporate board members neglect their functions coupled with the presence of inadequate disclosure in reporting of risk and its related activities, and inadequate risk management frameworks especially in the DMBs (Sanusi, 2010). These resulted in the review of the erstwhile 2009 CG code in Nigeria to the issue of a new one in 2011 with the expectation that it will enhance firm performance (Kakanda, Basariah, & Chandren, 2017).However, there is a stream of studies on the relationship between CG characteristics and firm performance (for instance, Arora & Sharma, 2016; Elyasiani & Zhang, 2015; Vafeas, 1999), yet, their results are mixed and fragmented due to differences in governance system, economic, social, and legal settings (Kakanda et al., 2016).Hence, this study hypothesized that CG characteristics have a positive relationship with firm performance.However, the result of this
study depicts that the relationship between the explanatory variables and firm performance is
mixed since both significant and insignificant positive and negative effects are obtained
