This paper examines the role of women helping women in corporate America. Using a merged panel of directors and executives for large U.S. corporations between 1997 and 2009, we find a positive association between the female share of the board of directors in the previous year and the female...

This paper studies the impact of gender quotas for corporate board seats on corporate decisions. We examine the introduction of Norway's 2006 quota, comparing affected firms to other Nordic companies, public and private, that were unaffected by the rule. We find that affected firms undertook...

This paper finds that women-owned private firms were less likely than firms owned by men to downsize their workforces during the Great Recession. Year-to-year employment reductions were as much as 29 percent smaller at women-owned firms, even after controlling for industry, size, and...

This paper examines the two-way relationship between managerial compensation and corporate risk by exploiting an unanticipated change in firms' business risks. The natural experiment provides an opportunity to examine two classic questions related to incentives and risk — how boards adjust...

This paper analyzes the effect of competition on a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of quality. Using U.S. consumer price index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find that stores facing...

Using a 40-year panel of all public school teachers and principals in New York State, we explore how female principals affect rates of teacher turnover—an important determinant of school quality. We find that male teachers are about 12% more likely to leave their schools when they work under...

While businesses require funding to start and grow, they also rely on human capital, which affects how they raise funds. Labor market frictions make financing labor different than financing capital. Unlike capital, labor cannot be owned and can act strategically. Workers face unemployment costs,...