We study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. The empirical analysis is based on accounting panel data from Bureau Van Dijk's Amadeus. Our identification strategy relies on both double and triple difference estimators with ex-ante...

Purpose – As pressures mount for women directors on corporate boards (WDOCB) from different stakeholders, companies become more interested in finding out how WDOCB impact sustainability disclosure. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of gender diverse boards on the...

We examine the effect of board gender diversity on accounting conservatism. Particularly, we investigate changes in the degree of conservatism for firms that transit from an all-male board (audit committee) to a gender diverse board (audit committee). Using a sample of U.S. firms from 1998 to...

Board room quotas have recently received an increasing amount of attention. This paper provides novel evidence on firm performance from an exogenous change in female board participation in Sweden. We use the credible threat, aimed at listed firms, of a quota law enacted by the Swedish deputy...

This paper examines whether board gender diversity affects corporate cash holdings using S&P 1,500 index firms in the US for the period 2006–2015. We document a significantly negative relationship between board gender diversity and cash holdings. We also find a strong negative effect of female...

We explore the labor market effects of gender and race by examining board leadership appointments. Prior studies are often limited by observing only hired candidates, whereas the boardroom provides a controlled setting where both hired and unhired candidates are observable. Although diverse...

We investigate the relationship between boardroom gender diversity and firm risk. To identify a causal effect of gender on risk, we use a dynamic model that controls for reverse causality and for gender and risk being influenced by unobservable firm factors. We find no evidence that female...

This paper examines the relation between gender diversity on the board of directors and the likelihood that a company receives an emphasis of matter going concern audit opinion. Gender diversity on the board and the audit committee is examined. We find that, after controlling for the strength of...

Effective and qualitative corporate governance is the distinctive feature of newly emerging economy. Corporate governance has received significant attention due to global financial crisis and recent corporate failures involving multinational corporations all over the world. As the global...

The problem that plagues Indian family-controlled firms is expropriation of minority shareholders by majority shareholders. Gender quota legislation that mandates appointment of at least one female director without specifying the director type as “independent” exacerbates this...