The objective of this study is to verify the effect of gender diversity on the board of directors (BD) and the executive committee (EC) of participating Canadian firms with regard to the financial performance and the mediating role of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) orientation in this relationship. The study sample was composed of 133 Canadian firms, and the data cover an 18 year timeline (2002–2019), with 925 observations. This paper provides empirical support for the effect that gender diversity in turnover has on the financial performance of firms and explains 53% of its variance. In addition to supporting the beneficial effect of gender diversity on performance, the study reveals the mediating mechanism through the ESG orientation of companies explaining almost 4% of the total effect of gender diversity on performance. By analyzing two levels of diversity, the study revealed the superiority of the effect of gender diversity in BDs as compared to ECs. We discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of the results found, as well as the limitations and future prospects of research on the subject.
The main purpose of this paper is to bring a better understanding of the phenomenon of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) by dealing with their definitional issues. Our objective is to understand why it would be difficult to have a standard and common definition of SWFs and how this definition concern could present a problem, especially for academic research. We analyzed the history of SWFs, their creation objectives, their sources of funding, the performance of their investments and their governance structure and compared them with other types of funds. We find that the lack of a common definition stems mainly from their: i) hybrid nature: SWFs are created and controlled by governments, but their investment strategies are similar to private funds; ii) high heterogeneity: SWFs have different structures, sources of funding and other creation objectives; iii) lack of transparency. Despite the establishment of Generally Accepted Principles and Practices for SWFs know as Santiago Principles, SWFs remain opaque structure and iv) similarities with other sovereign and private investors, especially in their investment strategies. These definitional problems could explain the lack of consensus on empirical studies about SWFs and the issues about the regulation of their activities. Otherwise, this study targets to contribute to the global debate on the regulation of their transactions, essentially by clarifying their subtle differences with other investment vehicles.
Prior research has found mixed evidence regarding the relationships between board gender diversity (BGD) and firm value. Moreover, there is a lack of evidence on the channels through which BGD affects firm performance; hence, this paper tackles this issue. We aim to investigate the relationship between BGD and firm performance and to explore the mediating role of intellectual capital efficiency (ICE) in this relationship. Using a multivariate regression analysis and a sample of 4008 North American firms from 2002 to 2020 (14,382 firm-year observations), we find that gender diversity is positively related to financial performance, confirming that a diversified board improves board effectiveness and brings new resources to the firm, which allows it to improve its performance. More interestingly, the results of the Structural Equation Model (SEM) indicate that the relationship between gender diversity and performance is more pronounced with the mediating role of ICE. Our results are robust, controlling for the endogeneity and heteroscedasticity issues, with several controls for firm- and country-level characteristics, using alternative sample compositions and alternative econometric techniques, and including year, industry, country and firm-fixed effects. Interestingly, this paper shows strong evidence that the effect of BGD on firm value is more effective by incorporating the role of intellectual capital efficiency.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.