We investigate the relationship between boardroom gender diversity and firm risk. To identify a causal effect of gender on risk, we use a dynamic model that controls for reverse causality and for gender and risk being influenced by unobservable firm factors. We find no evidence that female boardroom representation influences equity risk. We also show that findings of a negative relationship between the two variables are spurious and driven by unobserved between-firm heterogeneous factors.

We link the reputation incentives of independent directors to the informativeness of stock prices. We show that when more independent directors rank a directorship high, the firm-specific information content in a firm's stock price increases. Further, independent directors with high reputation incentives serve firms that voluntarily disclose more information and display lower crash risk. We find similar results when using plausibly exogenous shocks to the reputation incentives of independent directors. Our results therefore support a causal interpretation of the positive influence that independent directors with reputation incentives exert on corporate transparency.

Using comprehensive corporate and retail loan data, we show that the corporate culture of banks explains their risk-taking behaviour. Banks whose corporate culture leans towards aggressive competition are associated with riskier lending practices: higher approval rate, lower borrower quality, and fewer covenant requirements. Consequently, these banks incur larger loan losses and make greater contributions to systemic risk. The opposite behaviour is observed among banks whose culture emphasizes control and safety. Our findings cannot be explained by heterogeneity in a bank's business model, CEO compensation incentives or CEO characteristics. We use an exogenous shock to the US banking system during the 1998 Russian default crisis to support a causal inference.We are grateful to Marc Goergen (Associate Editor) and three anonymous referees for very helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank . Harvard IV-4 Psychosocial Dictionary. For instance, words like 'fast, expand, performance and win' are associated with compete culture, words like 'envision, freedom and venture' are associated with create culture, words like 'cooperate, human and partner' are associated with collaborate culture and words like 'monitor, competence and long-term' are associated with control culture.C 2019 British Academy of Management.

We link the reputation incentives of independent directors to the informativeness of stock prices. We show that when more independent directors rank a directorship high, the firm-specific information content in a firm's stock price increases. Further, independent directors with high reputation incentives serve firms that voluntarily disclose more information and display lower crash risk. We find similar results when using plausibly exogenous shocks to the reputation incentives of independent directors. Our results therefore support a causal interpretation of the positive influence that independent directors with reputation incentives exert on corporate transparency.

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