A growing body of research suggests that the composition of a firm’s board of directors can influence its environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. In the banking industry, ESG performance has not yet been explored to discover how a critical mass of women on the board of directors affects performance. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by testing the impact of a critical mass of female directors on ESG performance. Other board characteristics are accounted for: independence, size, frequency of meetings and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sustainability committee. We use fixed effects panel regression models on a sample of 108 listed banks in Europe and the United States for the period 2011–2016. Our main empirical evidence shows that the relationship between women on the board of directors and a bank’s ESG performance is an inverted U-shape. Therefore, the critical mass theory for banks is not supported, confirming that only gender-balanced boards positively impact a bank’s performance for sustainability. There is a positive link between ESG performance and board size or the presence of a CSR sustainability committee, while it is negative with the share of independent directors. With this work, we stress the key role of corporate governance principles in banks’ ESG performance, with relevant implications for both banks and supervisory authorities.
This study analyses the impact of women leaders on environmental performance in a sample of 96 listed banks in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region from 2011 to 2016. Gender diversity in leadership positions is explored through women in the board of directors, chief executive officer gender, and the interaction between these two aspects. This study sheds light on inconsistent results in prior literature by testing three theoretical perspectives: gender difference, critical mass, and homophily. The main results suggest that there is nonlinear relationship between women directors and the environmental performance of banks and that female chief executive officers play a strategic role in shaping this relationship, by confirming the homophily perspective for the banking sector. Therefore, leader gender diversity is an important driver of environmental sustainability in banks, which are increasingly involved in environmental issues either directly, as companies, or indirectly, through their lending activity.
According to a 2017 survey, approximately two in five European residents believe that the number of tourists poses a threat to the continent's cultural heritage. In order to investigate the determinants of this perception, the data from this survey of 26,000 residents was used to estimate ordered probit models. The results from these reveal that the probability of overtourism being viewed as a threat to cultural heritage is significantly lower for residents living near historical monuments, sites or festivals. The perception of overtourism as a threat is generally higher in cities in comparison with rural areas.
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