Leveraging as a quasi-natural experiment the staggered passage of universal demand laws, which raise the difficulty of shareholder lawsuits, we examine the effect of shareholder litigation rights on ESG controversies. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that an exogenous decline in...

Employing as a quasi-natural experiment an unexpected judgment by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that raised the difficulty of shareholder litigation, we explore the effect of shareholder litigation rights on board gender diversity. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that an...

We exploit the Great Recession of 2008 to study how firms view corporate social responsibility (CSR). When confronted with an adverse exogenous shock, firms are forced to prioritize. Our results show that, during the Great Recession, firms do not lessen their overall CSR investments, suggesting...

We explore the effect of board independence on CSR investments during a stressful time, i.e. during the Great Recession. Our results show that independent directors exhibit an unfavorable view of CSR investments during the crisis. Stronger board independence leads to a significant reduction in...

This study investigates the performance of socially controversial companies during a financial crisis. Companies are usually considered controversial if they are involved in controversial businesses such as alcohol, tobacco, firearms, nuclear etc. The results show that controversial firms...

Motivated by agency theory, we investigate the effect of managerial ownership on CSR engagement. Exploiting Lewbel's (2012) heteroskedastic identification and using a large U.S. sample of over 14,000 observations across 18 years, we find that higher managerial ownership diminishes CSR engagement...

Purpose: We investigate the effect of uncertain times on LGBT-supportive corporate policies, exploiting a novel text-based measure of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) recently constructed by Baker et al. (2016). LGBT-supportive policies have attracted a great deal of attention in the media...

We investigate the effect of board gender diversity on managerial risk-taking incentives. Our results demonstrate that companies with stronger board gender diversity provide more powerful executive risk-taking incentives. It appears that female directors’ risk aversion exacerbates managers’...

In times of crisis, corporate governance, particularly the gender equality aspect, is critically important. Motivated by the phrase ‘gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow’, we investigate how board gender diversity affects asset redeployability, which is a key element in the...

Exploiting a novel measure of corporate culture based on cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, we examine how female board representation influences a culture of innovation, and also whether female directors spur innovation culture in the presence of an active takeover market. Our results...