This paper examines whether board gender diversity affects corporate cash holdings using S&P 1500 index firms in the US for the period 2006-2015. We document a significantly negative relationship between board gender diversity and cash holdings. We also find a strong negative effect of female independent directors consistent with monitoring function. Moreover, in accordance with the critical mass theory, we find a negative effect of female directors' presence and voice on cash holdings. Our findings are robust to alternative econometric specifications, alternative measures of cash holdings and corporate governance, difference-in-differences, propensity score matching, and two-stage least squares. This study offers useful insights into the current global debate on gender diversity and its implications for firms. K E Y W O R D Scash holdings, corporate governance, gender diversity

We examine the effect of stock liquidity and corporate governance on the firm's leverage decision in the order-driven stock trading system and less stringent governance environment of Australia. Using a sample of 1,207 non-financial firms from 2001 to 2013, resulting in 9,855 firm-year observations, we find the posited negative stock liquidity-leverage relation, confirming prior research observations that firms with more liquid stocks are significantly less leveraged. We also find a significant and negative relation between corporate governance quality (CGQ) and leverage, indicating that firms with high CGQ significantly reduce leverage. In a closer analysis, we find that the significantly negative CGQ-leverage relation exists only for firms with high stock liquidity and does not exist for firms with low stock liquidity. Our study is the first to examine such an interactive relationship among stock liquidity, corporate governance and leverage. The results, which are robust to a range of alternative proxies and to additional tests, provide new insights into the determinants of leverage.

We examine the impact of Australia's Remuneration Amendment Act 2011 on CEO compensation and its spill-over effect on cash holdings to better understand how the new legislation affects the principal-agent relationship. Using a sample of ASX top 300 firms from 2004 to 2015, we find that the Act leads to more use of equity-based compensation. We also document that, after the introduction of the Act, CEO equity-based and total compensations are negatively related with cash holdings, i.e., more equity and total compensations lead to lower cash holdings (a spill-over effect), indicating alignment of the principal-agent interests. We praise the Act for the achievements. Our results are robust to different estimation techniques. Our findings provide important insights for the discussion on compensation regulations.

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