In this paper we investigate the state of the art of women representation in Italian corporate boards, trying also to assess its determinants. We find that female presence still concerns the minority of companies and a small number of women. Moreover, female directorship is associated to some...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This research article examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and corporate ESG disclosure variables by analyzing 10,121 publicly traded companies listed worldwide with historical ESG data available in Bloomberg from 2016 to 2020. The paper seeks to answer whether corporate...

Using a panel dataset of non-financial public companies in Italy covering the period 2005–2013, this paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between female representation on corporate boards and corporate debt. The presence of women in the boardroom might seem to push...

The research on women entrepreneurship has mainly studied these topics: i) the characteristics and motivations (Brush and Hisrich, 1991; Pablo-Martí et al., 2014), ii) the strategic choice (Verheul et al., 2008), iii) the role of leadership (Schwartz, 1976; Justo et al. 2006)), iv) the entry barriers...

Women's weak bargaining power against spouses can be a hurdle to their entrepreneurship opportunities. By utilizing the state- and time-varying divorce laws in the U.S., we find that female entrepreneurship increases significantly when the divorce laws give women stronger bargaining power. This...