This paper investigates whether female independent directors are more likely to impose high dividend payouts. We find evidence that firms with a larger fraction of female directors on their board have greater dividend payouts. This finding is robust to alternative econometric specifications, and alternative measures of dividend payouts and female board representation. The positive effect of board gender composition on dividends remains when we employ propensity score matching, the instrumental variable approach, and difference-in-differences approach to address potential endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, we find that board gender composition significantly increases the dividend payout only for firms with weak governance, suggesting that female directors use dividend payouts as a governance device.

Using a hand-collected dataset, we study whether CEO political ideology affected S&P 500 firms’ reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. During the pandemic, CEOs had the option to distribute the pain of the pandemic’s impact onto shareholders by paying lower dividends, onto the workforce by reducing labor costs, or to share the pain. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs were more likely to aggressively reduce labor costs while still meeting dividend expectations. Conversely, other CEOs would have been less likely to meet dividend expectations and less likely to reduce labor costs. Our findings support this hypothesis. We also find that during the pandemic, conservative CEOs used temporary downsizing to avoid earnings losses, enabling them to meet dividend expectations.

Are MNEs more socially responsible, and where is this more likely to occur? Are firms less responsible in emerging or transitional economies, and what impact does the dominant national corporate governance regime have? We explore the association between public listing and the existence of a CSR code within specific institutional settings and assess whether MNEs are any different to their local counterparts, based on an internationally comparative survey. We find that listed firms as well as firms from civil law countries are more likely to have CSR statements. MNEs are also more likely to have CSR statements, independent of their country of origin. While we find consistent evidence of a correlation between the existence of a CSR statement and investment in staff training, the correlation between the former and employee-friendly HRM is weaker.

This paper examines the effect of board gender diversity on renewable energy consumption. Using a panel of 11,677 firm-year observations from the USA for 2008–2016, we find a positive relationship between board gender diversity and renewable energy consumption. Moreover, boards require two or more women for women to have a significant impact on renewable energy consumption, consistent with the critical mass theory. Further, we document that the positive impact of female directors on renewable energy consumption stems from female independent rather than female executive directors. Finally, we find a positive effect of the interaction between renewable energy consumption and board gender diversity on firm financial performance. Our findings are robust to different identification strategies and estimation techniques.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the market's reaction to U.K. insider transactions and analyzes whether the reaction depends on the firm's ownership. We present three major findings. First, differences in regulation between the U.K. and United States, in particular the speedier reporting of trades in the U.K., may explain the observed larger abnormal returns in the U.K. Second, ownership by directors and outside shareholders has an impact on the abnormal returns. Third, it is important to adjust for news released before directors' trades. In particular, trades preceded by news on mergers and acquisitions and CEO replacements contain significantly less information.

This paper provides new evidence that correlated abnormal compensation of CEOs and directors is symptomatic of agency problems associated with cronyism. We find that director abnormal compensation has a negative impact on the likelihood of CEO turnover and reduces the sensitivity of CEO turnover to poor stock performance. However, for firms with greater institutional ownership the adverse effects of director abnormal compensation are mitigated, and the negative impact of abnormal compensation on firm performance is reduced. These findings suggest that correlated abnormal compensation of CEOs and directors is likely associated with agency problems.