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This study examines the impact of female board representation on firm-level strategic behavior within the domain of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We build on social identity theory to predict that greater female representation on a firm's board will be negatively associated with both the number of acquisitions the firm engages in and, conditional on doing a deal, acquisition size. Using a comprehensive, multiyear sample of U.S. public firms, we find strong support for our hypotheses. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings through the use of a dijference-in-dijferences analysis on a subsample of firms that experienced exogenous changes in board gender composition as a result of director deaths.

This study examines the impact of board gender diversity on financial misconduct. The findings suggest firms with genderdiverse boards commit fewer financial reporting mistakes and engage in less fraud. The findings hold after accounting for the potentially endogenous nature of board demographic characteristics via instrumental variable approach. Furthermore, the findings are consistent in pre- and post-regulation (Sarbanes-Oxley) periods and hold for firms with good and bad governance. The findings do not seem driven by differences in effort or quality, in terms of independence and expertise, of female and male directors. The benefit derived from increasing the number of female directors on corporate boards seems to diminish at higher levels of gender diversity, indicating that impact of gender diversity on decreasing the likelihood of financial misconduct may be a result of a change to board group dynamics.

The question of whether females tend to act more ethically or risk-averse compared to males is an interesting ethical puzzle. Using a large sample of US firms over the 1992-2014 period, we investigate the effect that the gender of a chief executive officer (CEO) has on earnings management using classification shifting. We find that the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act period was characterized by high levels of classification shifting by both female and male CEOs, but the magnitude of such practices is, surprisingly, significantly higher in firms with female CEOs than in those with male CEOs. By contrast, our results suggest that following the passage of the punitive SOX Act, classification shifting by female CEOs declined significantly, whilst it remained pervasive in firms with male CEOs. This suggests that the observable differences in financial reporting behavior between male and female CEOs seem to be because female CEOs are more risk-averse, but not necessarily more ethically sensitive than their male counterparts are. The central tenets of our findings remain unchanged after several additional checks, including controlling for alternative earnings management techniques, corporate governance mechanisms, CEO and chief financial officer characteristics and propensity score-matching.

The aim of our research is to analyze how board characteristics influence firm performance. In this paper, we specifically examine how board size, board independence, CEO duality, female directors and board compensation affect firm performance in a sample of international firms. The final panel data sample is composed of 10,314 firm-year observations belonging to 34 countries that have been grouped into six geographic zones: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and Oceania. Drawing on agency theory and dependence resource theory, we posit five hypotheses. The results show that some board characteristics, such as board size, board independence and having a female director, are positively associated with firm performance, whereas CEO duality, contrary to our expectations, also impacts positively on firm performance. Moreover, board compensation is not associated with firm performance. Tobin’s Q was used to measure firm performance, although an accounting measure was also employed for robustness analyses and to provide more validity to our results.

This paper proposes that gender differences in responses to recruitment rejections contribute to women's underrepresentation in top management. We theorize and show that women are less likely than men to consider another job with a prospective employer that has rejected them in the past. Because of women's status as a negatively stereotyped minority in senior roles, recruitment rejection triggers uncertainty about their general belonging in the executive domain, which in turn leads women to place greater weight than men on fair treatment and negatively affects their perceptions of the fairness of the treatment they receive. This dual process makes women less inclined than men to apply again to a firm that has rejected them. We test our theory with three studies: a field study using longitudinal archival data from an executive search firm, a survey of executives, and an experiment using executive respondents testing the effects of rejection on willingness to apply to a firm for another position. The results have implications for theory and practice regarding gender inequality at the labor market's upper echelons, highlighting that women's supply-side decisions to \"lean out\" of competition for senior roles must be understood in light of their previous experiences with employers' demand-side practices. Given the sequential nature of executive selection processes, rejection-driven differences in the willingness to compete in a given round would affect the proportion of available women in subsequent selection rounds, contributing to a cumulative gender disadvantage and thus possibly increasing gender inequality over time.

This study builds on insights from both upper echelons and agency perspectives to examine the effects on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of CEO's narcissism. Drawing on prior theory about CEO narcissism, we argue that CSR can be a response to leaders * personal needs for attention and image reinforcement and hypothesize that CEO narcissism has positive effects on levels and profile of organizational CSR; additionally, CEO narcissism will reduce the effect of CSR on performance. We find support for our ideas with a sample of Fortune 500 CEOs, operationalizing CEO narcissism with a novel media-based measurement technique that uses third-party ratings of CEO characteristics with validated psychometric scales.

This paper examines whether bank capital ratios and default risk are associated with the gender of the bank's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairperson of the board. Given the documented gender-based differences in conservatism and risk tolerance, we postulate that female CEOs and board Chairs should assess risks more conservatively, and thereby hold higher levels of equity capital and reduce the likelihood of bank failure during periods of market stress. Using a large panel of U.S. commercial banks, we document that banks with female CEOs hold more conservative levels of capital after controlling for the bank's asset risk and other attributes. Furthermore, while neither CEO nor Chair gender is related to bank failure in general, we find strong evidence that smaller banks with female CEOs and board Chairs were less likely to fail during the financial crisis. Overall, our findings are consistent with the view that gender-based behavioral differences may affect corporate decisions.

Using a dataset of all CEO transitions in Fortune 500 companies over a 15-year period, we analyze mechanisms that shape the promotion probabilities and leadership tenure of women and racial/ethnic minority CEOs. Consistent with the theory of the glass cliff, we find that occupational minorities—defined as white women and men and women of color—are more likely than white men to be promoted CEO of weakly performing firms. Though we find no significant differences in tenure length between occupational minorities and white men, we find that when firm performance declines during the tenure of occupational minority CEOs, these leaders are likely to be replaced by white men. We term this phenomenon the \"savior effect.\"