Abstract:The aim of this research was to explore one of the most intriguing dimensions of every firm's business-its performance. Aside from analysing the influence of industry's characteristics on the firm's performance, the authors addressed the characteristics of dynamic capabilities and their role in contribution to the firm's ultimate success. The analysis was conducted on a sample of 118 small Croatian manufacturing companies. The application of the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) approach revealed a statistically significant influence of both the industry's characteristics (represented by Porter's five forces framework) and dynamic capabilities (based on Teece's theory) on the firm's performance, where the influence of dynamic capabilities is proven to be larger than that of the industry.

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With the intention to analyze the effects of different board characteristics on the insurance companies’ performance, this research article explores the impact of board gender diversity and size on the performance of the insurance companies in Croatia. It analyzes the impact of characteristics of both boards, the board of directors and the supervisory board on corporate performance. The analysis, conducted using dynamic panel model, covers all insurance companies in Croatia operating in the 2007–2013 period. The main findings suggest that gender diversity at the top positions is not critical for financial success. Specifically, it is established that women acting as presidents of supervisory board deteriorate insurer’s performance measured by return on assets (ROA). This is also the case when more women are present in the board of directors. Moreover, the findings of the model measuring performance by both ROA and return on equity demonstrate that financial performance of insurance companies is negatively influenced by the number of members of the board of directors. The article upgrades the existing research by providing new support for the effects of board structure on performance in insurance industry, with specific reference to effects of gender diversity. Moreover, this study extends the existing literature in this field by introducing two corporate governance mechanisms in the analysis, that is, both the board of directors and the supervisory board. Furthermore, it is, to the authors knowledge, the first attempt to describe the effects of diversity in terms of gender on performance in the insurance sector.

This paper investigates the influence of gender diversity in the boardroom of Croatian banks on their performance. Specifically, we deal with both management and supervisory boards. Moreover, based on critical mass theory, the authors try to find out what constitutes critical mass. Using a static panel analysis on a sample of all commercial banks that operated in the period 2002-2014, three models were estimated with return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and net interest margin (NIM) as dependent variables. Board structure variables include gender of the chairperson, size of the board, share of women on the board and four dummy variables constructed on critical mass theory, specifically uniform group, skewed group, tilted group and balanced group. Other controls employed in the model include capital adequacy, the growth rate of assets at the bank level, ownership, age and a crisis dummy. The main finding is that when a critical mass of 20%-40% of women on the management board has been reached, bank performance improves.

In this paper, the authors tried to examine whether and to what extent board structure influences bank performance. Although this issue has occupied scholars and researchers over the years, most of them relate to the US banking market or other developed countries and, to a much lesser extent, to the European markets. With the aim of fulfilling this gap, we decided to find out evidence on the aforementioned relationship in the banking sector in Croatia. Specifically, our analysis was conducted on a sample of Croatian banks and savings banks in the 2002-2013 period. Using four measures of board structure such as gender of the president of the management board, management board female members, supervisory board size and supervisory board female members and employing Arellano-Bover/Blundell-Bond estimator, the research results indicate that the supervisory board size and the participation of women as president of the management board do not make an influence on bank performance. However, the growth of the proportion of women in both management and supervisory boards negatively affects bank performance.