We investigate stock market reactions to the announcement of the new, June 2022 European Union (EU) regulation on board gender diversity. We find positive abnormal market returns surrounding the EU announcement. The positive valuation effects are particularly strong for: firms in countries with...

This paper analyses the influence of female directors on the demand for audit effort and on financial reporting quality for a sample of Australian non-financial listed firms over the period 2004-2018. Our results suggest that gender diversity at the Board and the audit committee have a...

Using CEOs’ exposure to the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961) as a measure of early-life trauma in their life (termed, famine-CEOs), we find that firms led by famine-CEOs are associated with lower corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Our findings are consistent with the egoism...

We investigate the effect of managerial incentives and market power on bank risk-taking for a sample of 212 large US bank holding companies over 1997-2004 (i.e. 1,534 observations). Bank managers have incentives to prefer less risk while bank shareholders have preference for ‘excessive' risk....

α (“Alpha”) has symbolic importance on the investments side of finance. That is, a fundamental pillar of modern finance theory is the risk-return relation, and traditionally alpha is taken to represent the degree of “mispricing” in asset returns. But, such an interpretation is not...