Does CEO duality really affect corporate performance?

Most research investigating the impact of board leadership structure as a corporate governance mechanism, on corporate performance has focused largely on either the Anglo-American context or the Asian experience and has come up with diverse conclusions. This study sheds light on the extent to which corporate leadership structure affects corporate performance by providing empirical evidence from a sample of Egyptian listed firms. The initial econometric results indicate that CEO duality has no impact on corporate performance. However, when an interaction term between industry type and CEO duality is included in the model, the impact of CEO duality on corporate performance is found to vary across industries, a result that is supportive of both agency theory and stewardship theory. In addition, when firms are categorised according to their financial performance, CEO duality attracts a positive and significant coefficient only when corporate performance is low.