We explore the role of female directors in mitigating CEO luck. CEOs are “lucky” when they receive stock option grants on days when the stock price is the lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing. Our results show that board gender diversity significantly deters the...

Many companies in Germany must provide information beyond financial figures in their annual reports. For some years now, legislators have increasingly required information on non-financial aspects, such as the shares of women in leadership positions. Using a quantitative text analysis of annual...

We study the gender pay gap in the labor market for CEOs by analysing 1,174 outsider CEO successions over the past three decades across 18 countries. We find that male and female CEOs receive a similar compensation overall but this masks marked gender differences in the pay structure: namely,...

Scholars have previously investigated country and organizational-level factors associated with the incidence of female directors on boards. These studies, however, cannot explain why, in countries with strong gender equality and pressure for female directorships, firms are still hesitant to...

The problem that plagues Indian family-controlled firms is expropriation of minority shareholders by majority shareholders. Gender quota legislation that mandates appointment of at least one female director without specifying the director type as “independent” exacerbates this...

Greater gender diversity on bank board of directors is associated with higher compensation inequality because CEOs at these banks have higher base salary. This effect disappears during the financial crisis, largely due to adjustment of non-salary compensation