Female executives and corporate governance
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the gender of the top executives is associated with the strength of corporate governance mechanisms within a firm.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses panel and instrumental variable regressions on an eight-year sample of the S&P 1,500 firms.
Findings
The results indicate that firms with female Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers have higher quality governance practices. Moreover, female CEOs are documented to have the most significant influence on the governance attributes related to the board of directors and takeover defenses mechanisms.
Originality/value
Overall, these findings indicate that the gender of the firm’s executives may have important implications for the strength of corporate governance. The paper promotes the importance of the recent national policies in numerous countries on gender quotas at the executive level.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Academy of Finland (project no. 259676), the Finnish Foundation for Share Promotion, and the Finnish Savings Banks Research Foundation. The author would like to thank Melissa Frye, Heather Knewtson, Claire Lending, Mukunthan Santhanakrishnan, Stanley D. Smith, Wim Van der Stede, Sami Vähämaa, and participants at the 2011 Eastern Finance Association Meeting and the 2011 Southern Finance Association Meeting, and at the research seminars at the University of Central Florida and Auburn University for helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts of the paper. This essay was mostly written as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Central Florida and revised when visiting the University of Manchester.
Citation
Vähämaa, E. (2017), "Female executives and corporate governance", Managerial Finance, Vol. 43 No. 10, pp. 1056-1072. https://doi.org/10.1108/MF-04-2016-0098
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited