Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> The research paper investigates the impact of corporate board characteristics on key value measures across 104 publicly traded MENA banks over the 2010–2024 period. Fixed Effects (EE) and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) are employed to test the research hypotheses. The study extends the literature by employing a multi-theoretical approach including agency, stakeholder, resource dependency, signalling, managerial entrenchment and risk-based perspectives and providing a critical analysis of the effect of board characteristics on specific value measures and drawing on two distinct banking models, conventional versus Islamic. The results provide consistent evidence that corporate board characteristics play a significant role in influencing bank value measures in the MENA region, although the strength and significance of these effects vary across the valuation measures. In particular, ownership concentration, board gender diversity, and audit committee independence all exhibit a positive relationship with valuation metrics. Duality, however, shows a negative relationship with stock returns. Interestingly, the findings reveal that corporate governance mechanisms are more closely aligned with value measures in conventional banks, whereas this alignment is less evident in Islamic banks, which tend to be affected by additional institutional and governance factors. These results offer valuable insights to banks’ managers, customers, investors, and policymakers on the impact of corporate board attributes on value measures and to what extent this is driven by banking model and their financial performance determinants. <bold>JEL CLASSIFICATION</bold> G21 · G30 · G32 </p>