Noura Zaidi, Mohamed Ali Azouzi, Tarek Sadraoui
In this article I examine the impact of the educational background in general and the financial education particularly of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) on bank performance of the Tunisian resident banks. This area of research is important given that researchers in this area argue that CEO characteristics such as educational orientation, age and functional career influence the way business problems are perceived and the decision making process. The information gathered from the annual reports of these banks and using a research questionnaire shows that the educational path ways for most CEOs in the Tunisian bank system are financially educated. This paper finds that CEO educational attainment, both level and field, matters for bank performance. More specifically the regression analysis offer robust evidence that banks led by CEOs with higher education outperform their peers. The main result of this paper is that CEO financial education positively affects bank performance. Such CEOs improve performance when he is longer serving, financially educated and when he delegates more decision making authority. Our findings suggest that financial education delivers skills enabling CEOs to manage increasingly larger and complex banks and achieve higher performance outcomes. But our findings also partly support the view that engineering background also positively affects bank performance.