We examine how gender and beauty affect the likelihood of being voted as an All-Star in the financial analyst profession in both the United States and China. We find that female analysts are more likely to be voted as All-Star analysts in the United States, but good-looking female U.S. analysts...

We examine whether an unsophisticated investor's own gender and the gender of a sell-side analyst report writer jointly affect investor's investment judgements. Prior archival research suggests there is no factual basis for investors, irrespective of their gender, to respond differentially to...

This paper examines the impact of teamwork on sell-side analysts' performance. Using a hand-collected sample of over 50,000 analyst research reports, we find that analyst teams issue more than 70% of annual earnings forecasts. In contrast, most prior research implicitly assumes that forecasts...

We examine how broker characteristics impact the performance of their recommendations in Europe. In contrast to extant research, we focus on a non-U.S. sample that post-dates the important regulatory changes of 2003-2004. Our research has three intriguing findings. First, we show that more...

This study examines the effects of gender on executive financial decision-making as it relates to management earnings forecast error. The primary question addressed is: do female and male executives behave differently when issuing management earnings forecasts? Additionally, the following...

Using a sample of U.S. firms spanning 2001-2008, we examine whether female directors or nonexecutive female directors or female audit committee members affect auditor choice and audit effort measured by audit fees. After correcting for selectivity bias and controlling for other known board, firm...

This paper investigates whether gender diversity in the boardroom is associated with corporate cash holdings and whether investor protection moderates the effect of corporate board gender diversity on corporate cash holdings. Using 20,750 firm-year observations from 33 countries, our analyses...

The popular and academic literatures report that women, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are under-represented on US corporate boards of directors, relative to their incidence in the US labor force. We confirm this observation by tabulating the presence of female and under-represented...

We examine the effect of board gender diversity on accounting conservatism. Particularly, we investigate changes in the degree of conservatism for firms that transit from an all-male board (audit committee) to a gender diverse board (audit committee). Using a sample of U.S. firms from 1998 to...

Board diversity is important especially in countries which practice a one-tier board system, such as Malaysia. Under the system, board appointments are usually controlled by the firm's substantial shareholders, and as a result, directors are chosen based on “the old-boy” network or “people...