We examine stock market reactions, direct costs of compliance, and board adjustments to California Senate Bill No. 826 (SB 826), the first mandated board gender diversity quota in the United States. Announcement returns average -1.2% and are robust to the use of multiple methodologies. Returns...

This study examines the relationship between female board members and firm performance for a panel of 250 US firms over the years 2000 and 2006 which marks an epic in gender equality and affirmative efforts. We have used GLS -fixed effect regression to estimate the relationship of four proxies...

We find that investors responded positively to a mandated gender quota in Korea, which requires large public firms to include at least one female director on their boards. Investor responses were more positive for firms with high risk, weak corporate governance, and poor social performance,...

We examine the depth of the labor market for female directors following an exogenous shock to demand caused by California Senate Bill 826. Despite a surge in female appointments, new female director qualifications remain stable when benchmarked to control groups, indicating a deep labor market....

In Germany, an intensive public debate about increasing female participation in leadership positions started in 2009 and proceeded until the beginning of 2015, when the German parliament enacted a board gender quota. In that period, the share of women on supervisory boards for 111 German...

This study discusses differences in the effectiveness of voluntary and mandatory policies promoting women on boards and their potential effects on stock price returns. Furthermore, it classifies the announcements of the policy proposals discussed in Germany and analyzes their impact using event...

Using the natural experiment created by France's 2011 board gender-quota law, we find that the presence of women on boards increases firms’ environmental and social (E&S) performance. Our results are robust to controlling for several directors’ observable characteristics and proxies for...

We study the impact of a 2011 law on the diversity of bank boards. The law required all listed companies in Italy (including banks) to increase the share of female representatives on their boards up to one third of total seats. We look at listed banks (the ones directly targeted by the law), but...

The paper proceeds from the assumption that the inequalities of opportunity between men and women on the labor market and in society overall tend to consolidate in the management bodies of large companies. The predominance of men on the supervisory boards of Germany's largest private sector...

This paper examines the gender pay gap in top management teams and how it is affected by directors' embeddedness. We can reconfirm the result of previous studies that differences in managerial compensation between women and men exist, even after controlling for company properties and human...