This study examines the interactive effects of oil price shocks and corporate governance mechanisms on firm performance among 151 listed firms in Nigeria over the period 2011 to 2025. Nigeria’s heavy dependence on crude oil exports makes its corporate sector uniquely vulnerable to external commodity price volatility, yet the moderating role of governance quality in buffering these shocks remains insufficiently understood in the extant literature. Drawing on agency theory, stakeholder theory, and the resource dependence theory, this paper employs an ex-post facto research design combined with unbalanced panel data regression techniques, including pooled OLS, fixed effects, and random effects estimators validated by the Hausman specification test. The study controls for firm size, industry type, leverage, profitability, growth opportunities, auditor type, board size, and board independence. Findings reveal that oil price shocks exert a statistically significant negative effect on firm performance across multiple measures, including return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin’s Q. More importantly, strong corporate governance — proxied by board independence and board size — significantly attenuates the adverse performance effects of oil price volatility. These results are robust across alternative specifications and post-estimation diagnostics, including tests for heteroskedasticity, serial correlation, and cross-sectional dependence. The study contributes original empirical evidence to the governance-performance nexus literature in oil-dependent emerging economies and offers actionable policy recommendations for regulators, institutional investors, and corporate boards
ONIPE ADABENEGE YAHAYA (Wed,) studied this question.