Among the existing studies that examine issues related to female-owned businesses (FOBs) and male-owned businesses (MOBs), much of the attention has been devoted to finding performance differences between FOBs and MOBs (Ahl 2006). Very little attention has been directed at the broad business,...

Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data from 2006-2017 on 130,000 firms in 130 countries across the globe, we document that women-led firms tend to underperform men-led firms. The main contribution of this work is to shed light on three mechanisms that help explain the...