Do Board Gender Quotas Matter? Selection, Performance and Stock
Do Board Gender Quotas Matter? Selection, Performance and Stock Market Effects∗ Giulia Ferrari1, Valeria Ferraro2, Paola Profeta3, and Chiara Pronzato4 1INED 2Boston College 3Bocconi University and Dondena 4University of Turin Abstract From business to politics and academia, the economic effects of gender quotas are under scrutiny. We provide new evidence based on the introduction of mandatory gender quotas for boards of directors of Italian listed companies: quotas are associated with positive selection (higher education and lower age of board members), a lower variability of stock market prices, no significant impact on firms’ performance and a positive effect on stock market returns at the date of the board’s election. Overall, our results are consistent with gender quotas giving rise to a beneficial restructuring of the board positively received by the market. JEL Codes: J20, J48, J78. Keywords: education, age, financial markets. ∗A previous version of this paper circulated as working paper IZA 10239 (2016), Dondena 92 (2016), CHILD 43 (2016) under the title "Gender quotas: Challenging the boards, performance and the stock market". We thank Luca Bagnato, Vittoria Dicandia and Paolo Longo for excellent research assistance. We thank the Department of Equal Opportunities of the Italian Presidency of Council of Ministries for the partnership in the project “Women mean business and economic growth” financed by the European Commission, DG Justice, which provided financial support for a part of the data collection. We thank J. Ignacio Conde-Ruiz for data on the Spanish companies. We thank Stefania Albanesi, Mario Amore, Massimo Anelli, Marianne Bertrand, Paolo Colla, Raquel Fernàndez, Luca Flabbi, Vincenzo Galasso, Sissel Jensen, Barbara Petrongolo, Debraj Ray, Fabiano Schivardi and Lise Vesterlund for useful comments.
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