This paper investigates the relationship between gender of the CEO and composition of the board of directors (female chairman and share of women in the boardroom) and firm's risk attitudes measured as variability in four firm outcome variables (investments, profits, return to equity, and sales)....

This paper analyzes the determinants of women on the boards of directors based on a panel sample of all Danish companies in the private sector with more than 50 employees. The share of women on the boards of directors was 12 percent in 2007 and has only slowly increased during the period...

Analyzing data on all U.S. employers in a cohort of entering firms, we document a highly skewed size distribution, such that the largest 5% account for over half of cohort employment at firm birth and more than two-thirds at firm age 7. Little of the size variation is accounted for by industry...

Korean government has invested significant amount of resources through credit guarantee funds to promote SMEs survival, performance and R&D investment. This study attempts to identify determinants of provision of credit guarantees and estimate their effects on firms R&D expenditures. The...

Female entrepreneurship has been regarded as inferior to its male equivalent in terms of performance. Literature on gender differences in entrepreneurship focus mostly on showing the differences, but not much literature discusses where the differences come from, and how to mitigate them. This...

This paper attempts to study the relationship between firm legal form and firm performance in the Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA) using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) database. Our analysis shows that open shareholding, closed shareholding, partnership, and limited...

In this paper, we focus on managerial characteristics of micro and small-sized firms. Using linked employer-employee data on the Portuguese economy for the 2010-2018 period, we estimate the impact of management teams' human capital on the probability of firms becoming financially distressed and...

When workers are in bad health, their productivity declines. We investigate whether the health of employees affects firm performance, taking advantage of the severity of the seasonal influenza seasons as a source of exogenous variation. We find that firms whose employees are particularly...

China is perceived to rely on subsidizing firms in targeted industries to improve their performance and stay competitive. We implement an approach that allows for the joint estimation of direct and indirect effects of subsidies on subsidized and non-subsidized firms. We find that firms that...

We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset to measure connections between politicians and the universe of firms. To identify the causal effect of access to political power, we exploit (i) new appointments to the company...