Government and financial institutions have attempted to address low financial inclusion in the development of sustainable microenterprises in rural Benin, especially with regard to women. In general, however, their actions have not been guided by evidence regarding the design of financing...

Corporate executives managing some of the largest public companies in the U.S. are shaped by their daughters. When a firm's CEO has a daughter, the corporate social responsibility rating is about 9.1% higher, compared to a median firm. The results are robust to confronting several sources of...

Studies document an unexplained wage gap between male and female workers even as female workers have increased their human capital through skill and education. At the executive level, where skill and education are similar, the results on gender-based pay gap persist and are primarily attributed...

Women in the workforce are key to healthy economies, but this does not mean that adding more women to the board will necessarily increase shareholder value or that the financial crisis would not have happened if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters. Negative stereotypes may be one reason...

We examine gender diversity, its impact on firm performance and earnings quality and particularly whether a critical number of female directors are required to empower them to best fulfil their duties on corporate boards. The extant literature shows a positive association exists between...

This study examines whether and how female directors enhance innovation performance. Based on a sample of U.S. firms, this study shows that firms with more female directors on boards present a more pronounced positive association between R&D and future firm performance (measured by earnings and...

Unlike previous studies that focus on accrual-based earnings management, this study analyzes real activities manipulation and investigates whether female directors on boards of directors (BoDs) affect managers’ real activities manipulation. Using a large sample of 11,831 firm-year observations...

We examine the implications of CEO gender for corporate debt structure. After controlling for endogeneity, firms with female CEOs issue less debt than firms with male CEOs. Although both risk aversion and overconfidence may serve as the channel of our main finding, we show that female CEOs being...