دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مدیران زن، کمیته های هیئت مدیره و عملکرد شرکت - الزویر 2018

Abstract

A number of studies have found little economic impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. We return to this issue in the context of large European firms. Our contribution is twofold. First, using information on the gender of CEOs children as a source of exogenous variation in female director appointments, we demonstrate a robust positive effect of female board representation on firm performance. Second, while previous work has considered female representation broadly, we focus on membership of board committees as a proxy for active involvement in corporate governance. We demonstrate economically meaningful positive effects on performance of female representation on board committees. Our evidence is supportive of an economic rationale for increased female representation on corporate boards. Key Words: Gender, Diversity, Firm Performance, Board Committees JEL Codes: G30, G34, J16 Acknowledgement: We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their comments. We also thank Renne Adams, Swarnava Biswas, Patricia Boyallian, Daniel Ferreira, Sudipto Dasgupta, Paolo Fulghieri, Ian Gregory-Smith, John Heywood, Vikram Nanda, Amiyatosh Purnanandam, and Ian Walker for their suggestions on previous versions of this paper. We are grateful for comments from the participants at Lancaster University Economics seminar series, The Geary Institute-UCD, RWI-Essen, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, NTNU, Queen Mary University of London, 5th Annual Corporate Finance Conference, Royal Economic Society Annual Conference 2016, Work, Pension and Employment Group Annual Conference, 2015. Research assistance from Rhys Wheeler and Molly Rose Ives, and financial assistance from Lancaster University pump priming grant are gratefully acknowledged.

6 Conclusion

Greater gender diversity in corporate decision making is a central theme of current governance regulations. Current research that focuses on gender diversity on corporate boards find no, or even a negative, effect of female board representation on firm profitability. This lack of economic benefits from female board representation means that any case for greater gender diversity needs to be structured around arguments for equity and moral justice. We return to this issue in the setting of large listed European firms where the level of female board representation is higher than that of the US and the UK.

The innovation of this paper is twofold. Existing research has focused on the effect of representation on corporate boards. While a prerequisite for involvement in firm decision making, board representation does not guarantee it. We seek to more closely proxy involvement in decision making by focusing on gender diversity on key board committees. Specifically, we investigate the effect of the assignment of female directors to three important board committees on firm performance. Directors on audit, nomination, and compensation committees can directly influence the core functions of corporate governance, and through that firm performance. Our second innovation is to adopt an identification strategy which we believe gets us closer to the causal effect of gender diversity on firm performance. We use the observation that the gender composition of children influences parental preferences. With this in mind, we use whether the CEO has a daughter as a source of exogenous variation in the probability of female representation on the firm’s board and committees. We demonstrate that hiring a CEO who has a daughter has sizeable effects on board gender diversity. While not the focus of this paper this is an important finding in and of itself as it provides further evidence on the potential effects of exposure to diversity on (male) preferences and behaviour.