LAUSR

Most studies that have investigated the relationship between governance and performance of banks were interested in the developed countries and to a lesser extent, the emerging countries. In this study, we tried to look from an empirical perspective, at the impact of governance through some internal mechanisms, on the performance of banks in a developing country like Tunisia. According to Kolsi and Ghorbel (2011), the effect of governance on the financial and stock market performance is still unknown. This result goes in the same direction as that of Adjaoud et al. (journal compilation 15, 2007), leading to the lack of connection between governance and traditional performance measures. The empirical analysis is performed on a sample of eight Tunisian commercial banks listed on the Stock Exchange over the period 2000–2011; we can conclude that there is no standard governance structure and that each bank should adopt the appropriate governance structure to improve the performance of the financial market, in general, and the banking market, in particular. The verification of this central assumption in the Tunisian context, therefore, is the fundamental contribution of this study. It is for this reason that the results we, even modest, have achieved allow enriching the issue of the impact of some governance variables varying according to the chosen performance measurement, which is a neglected theme in the Tunisian context.