Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study gender diversity on the board of directors and the relation to risk management and corporate performance as measured by the variability of stock market return. Design/methodology/approach – The sample consists of companies from the RiskMetrics database from 2007 to 2011. This database contains information on corporate board of directors. Financial variables were collected from the Compustat database and CRSP database for the years 2005-2011. The authors then measure the effect of gender diversity on corporate performance in terms of firm risk, using the model by Cheng (2008) which measures the variability of stock market return. Findings – The study shows that more gender diversity on the board of directors impacts firm risk by contributing to lower variability of stock market return. The higher the percentage of female directors on the board, the lower the variability of corporate performance. Originality/value – The research design and findings assist in providing additional evidence about the role of women in corporate leadership positions and the association with corporate performance. The approach combines Cheng's (2008) model of stock market variability with the impact of gender diversity on the board of directors.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether companies with female executives and directors are less likely to be involved in financial reporting fraud litigation. Design/methodology/approach The authors build a data set comprised of companies from the Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse database that were involved in fraud litigation along with a control set of companies listed on the Compustat database for the time period 2007-2013. The authors use a logistic regression model to determine the likelihood of fraud when there is at least one woman in an executive position or on the board of directors. Findings The authors find that the presence of at least one female leader decreases the likelihood that the company will be involved in litigation for financial reporting fraud. The results are robust after controlling for sample selection bias by using a propensity score matched sample. Practical implications The findings add to the literature which indicates that women tend to be more risk averse and are more committed to ethics policies. The study also supports previous research that indicates large firms with inflated market value are more likely to be subject to fraud litigation. Originality/value The study combines the literature on the characteristics of women in leadership positions with the study of fraud litigation. The authors find evidence that the presence of either female executives or female directors lowers financial reporting fraud risk.

In this paper, we examine the performance of an impact investing strategy using the most ethical companies to build an impact investing portfolio. We test the time-series and cross-sectional returns of the impact portfolio, explore the financial analyst coverage of the most ethical firms, and run regressions to analyze the valuation of the most ethical firms. Our empirical results reveal that the portfolio consisting of the most ethical firms has a higher risk-adjusted return and that the most ethical firms have lower stock valuations than comparable stocks. We attribute our findings to the incomplete information in business ethics norms.

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