This paper studies the turnover of board of directors members in a sample of 72 companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange during the period 1988-1996. We investigate whether board members change more frequently when company performance is poor, as the literature suggests, and whether and how...

Despite a conventional wisdom that female board members positively impact firm performance, a thorough examination of the research to date reveals no consensus that female board members have either a positive or negative effect on firm performance. We build the largest dataset of Australian...

This paper studies economic effects of the gender composition of corporate boards, employing a new and unique longitudinal dataset of virtually all Russian companies whose shares were traded on the national stock market between 1998 and 2014. Using multiple identification approaches, alternative...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between females among the first hires of start-up companies and business success. Our results show that firms with female first hires have a higher share of female workers at the end of the first year after entry. Further, we find that firms with...

Due to the growth in international migration in recent decades, the workforce of firms in host countries has become considerably more diverse, both demographically and culturally. It is an important question for firms and for governments to ask whether there are some productivity-enhancing...

The paper examines if workplace gender diversity offers some explanation for the decline of unions in Britain. Using the WERS2004 linked employer-employee data and alternative econometric estimators it reports an inverse relationship between workplace union density and gender diversity. Gender...

In this paper we investigate the nexus between firm labor diversity and innovation using a linked employer-employee data from Denmark. Specifically, exploiting information retrieved from this comprehensive database and implementing proper instrumental variable strategies, we are able to identify...

Using a matched employer-employee data-set, we analyze how workforce diversity in terms of cultural background, education and demographic characteristics affects the productivity of firms in Denmark. Implementing a structural estimation of the firms' production function (Ackerberg et al. 2006),...

To investigate econometrically whether cultural diversity of a firm's employees boosts innovation, we create a unique linked employer-employee dataset that combines data from two innovation surveys in The Netherlands with administrative and tax data. We calculate three distinct measures of...

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...