This study sets out to examine the relative importance of legal and cultural institutions and personal values in directors' discretion. We present first evidence on the way personal and institutional factors together guide public company directors in decision-making concerning shareholders and...

Should boards of financial firms be blamed for the financial crisis? Using a large sample of data on nonfinancial and financial firms for the period 1996-2007, I document that the governance of financial firms is, on average, not obviously worse than in nonfinancial firms. In fact, using simple...

Should boards of financial firms be blamed for the financial crisis' Using a large sample of data on nonfinancial and financial firms for the period 1996-2007, I document that the governance of financial firms is, on average, not obviously worse than in nonfinancial firms. Even the issue of...

About 18% of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) members are women, which is well below the percentage of workers who are women around the world. To gain insights into why women represent a relatively low percentage of investment professionals, we survey the 2016 CFA membership, which consists of...

We document that women are less represented on corporate boards in Finance and more traditional STEM industry sectors. Even after controlling for differences in firm and country characteristics, average diversity in these sectors is 24% lower than the mean. Our findings suggest that...

Thought leadership in academic finance is more unequal than in other fields. Using data on the top 2% of scientists across all fields from Ioannidis et al. (2019, 2020), we show that the set of top scientists in finance is less diverse in terms of gender and geography than in economics and other...