We are the first to investigate the effect of board gender diversity on default risk across countries, largely focusing on various aspects of institutional setting at country-level. Intuitively, board gender diversity is likely to influence default risk as women on the board improves the board...

We document the negative effect of stock liquidity on default risk for a sample of 46 countries. We further find that default risk declines following the introduction of the Directive on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID)—an exogenous shock that increases liquidity. The effect of...