Board gender diversity and dividend policy in Australian listed firms: the effect of ownership concentration

Asia Pacific Journal of Management - We examine the association between board gender diversity and corporate dividend payout. Our results suggest that although board gender diversity impacts...     

Black–white wage differentials: duration and probability unemployment effects in a multiple of sample selection bias model

The extent to which probability and duration of unemployment affect the black–white wage differentials is examined in this paper. The paper simultaneously incorporates in the wage equation the multiple sample selection bias that occurs as a result of individuals’ propensity to be in the labor force, and the firm’s hiring decisions. The results reveal a substantial contribution of the duration of unemployment variable to the black–white wage differential, but a small portion of the differential is explained by the probability of unemployment. The results also indicate a sizeable difference between the contribution of the duration of unemployment variable to the male’s wage differentials (26%) and to the female’s (35%). The study finds that an individual’s labor force decision as well as a firm’s hiring decision are important in the wage determination process and that failure to account for the sample selectivity bias due to these two decisions will result in either underestimating or overestimating the wage differentials between black and white workers. At the macro level, the results seem to suggest that promotion of racial wage equality should be associated with policies that will minimize blacks’ incidence of unemployment and duration of unemployment spells.     

Product differentiation,market dynamics and the value relevance of trade payables: Evidence from UK listed firms

This paper provides a comprehensive evidence on how product and market dynamics affect the value relevance of trade payables. Using a sample of 2559 UK listed firms over the period 2005–2014, we find a positive relationship between trade payables and firm performance. Our evidence suggests that trade payables increase (decrease) performance in firms with differentiated products and demand uncertainty (larger market share). We demonstrate that the relative value relevance of bank credit versus suppliers’ credit is dependent on the nature of the product, the level of sales volatility, and market share. We use an innovative approach to assess the robustness of our results to omitted variable bias.     

Religiosity,borrower gender and loan losses in microfinance institutions: a global evidence

We examine the impact of religious beliefs on loan repayments in 770 microfinance institutions (MFIs) across 65 countries over the period 2006–2018. We find robust evidence of a negative relationship between religiosity and loan losses in MFIs. We also find that the relationship between religiosity and loan losses is stronger for MFIs in Protestant-dominated countries than in Catholic-dominated countries. Moreover, religiosity improves the operational self-sufficiency of MFIs through a reduction in loan losses. We find that religiosity does not improve the loan repayment behaviour of women borrowers, but it reduces the loan size per borrower. Overall, our evidence suggests that although religiosity reduces loan losses through religiosity-induced lender-risk aversion, it does not improve the loan repayment behaviour of borrowers. We also use several approaches to evaluate our results to the effects of endogeneity.

     

Corporate voluntary greenhouse gas reporting: Stakeholder pressure and the mediating role of the chief executive officer

The study sheds light on the extent to which various stakeholder pressures influence voluntary disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and how the impact is explained and moderated chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics of 215 FTSE 350 listed U.K. companies for the year 2011. The study developed a classification of GHG emission disclosure based on the guidelines of GHG Protocol, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Global Framework for Climate Risk Disclosure using content analysis. Evidence from the study suggests that some stakeholder pressure (regulatory, creditor, supplier, customer, and board control) positively impacts on GHG disclosure information by firms. We found that stakeholder pressure in the form of regulatory, mimetic, and shareholders pressure positively influenced the disclosure of GHG information. We also found that creditor pressure also had a significant negative relationship with GHG disclosure. Although CEO age had a direct negative effect on GHG voluntary disclosure, its moderation effect on stakeholder pressure influence on GHG disclosure was only significant on regulatory pressure.     

Board gender diversity and environmental,social, and economic value creation: Does family ownership matter?

Prior literature on firm value creation for stakeholders has oversimplified and narrowed the concept of value down to “economic returns.” Although economic returns are fundamental to a firm's core stakeholders (i.e., shareholders), other legitimate stakeholders want “value” beyond economic returns. We define stakeholder value as the financial and nonfinancial returns a firm can offer to its legitimate stakeholders, and empirically investigate whether board gender diversity (BGD) improves our multidimensional measure of value. Using Thomson Reuters' ASSET4 data for U.K.‐listed firms available from Eikon for the period 2007–2017, we report a significant positive relationship between BGD and stakeholder value creation. In particular, BGD increases social and environmental value creation in addition to economic returns. Furthermore, our results suggest that even though gender‐diverse boards are associated with stakeholder value creation in family firms, this is only conspicuous for environmental value creation. The findings suggest that although female directors cater to the interests of broader stakeholder groups, family ownership causes them to mainly focus on environmental stakeholders. The study provides important implications for regulators, stakeholders, and academic scholars.     

Definition of full-time and part-time employment,and distributional assumptions: the implications for the estimated full-time and part-time wage equations

This paper demonstrates that rejecting the standard definition of full-time and part-time workers, the estimated number of hours that an individual is likely to work as a full-time worker is a function of the type of distribution one assumes about the error term in the wage equation. Adopting a switching regression model with unknown sample selection, we have found that the normality assumption generates higher hours for full-timers in comparison with the non-normal distributions. We also noted that regardless of the distribution assumed, the hours differ from one industry to another. The implication is that the standard definition of full-time and part-time worker may not be appropriate for all firms irrespective of the distribution assumed. The paper also shows the sensitivity of parameter estimates to the distributional assumptions about the error term in the wage equation. The results indicate that the normal distribution wage equation estimates are relatively larger than the Weibull and exponential distributions. This finding is particularly important because such differences in estimated coefficients may have a direct wage influence on the wage gap between full-time and part-time workers across distributions.     

Firm Characteristics,Shareholder Sophistication and the Incidence of a ‘First Strike’ Under the ‘Two Strikes’ Rule in Australia

To restrain ‘excessive’ executive pay, Australia introduced new legislation in 2011, commonly known as the ‘two strikes’ rule. This rule has predictable consequences for publicly listed firms and their directors. In this study, we investigate which firm characteristics are associated with the incidence of a ‘first strike’ under the two strikes rule. We find that the incidence of a first strike is positively associated with higher levels of CEO pay, lower ownership concentration, smaller firm size, higher level of institutional ownership and CEO duality. Additional analysis suggests that shareholders fail to differentiate between CEO pay, which is related to the economic characteristics of a firm, and the pay that is not related to firm characteristics. This finding suggests that, unlike US shareholders, Australian shareholders do not appear to have a sophisticated understanding of CEO pay structure.     

Do Women and Ethnic Minority Directors Influence Firm Value? Evidence from Post‐Apartheid South Africa

Previous studies on the value relevance of board gender and ethnic diversity have produced mixed results. This paper re‐examines this relationship using hand‐collected data of 245 South African listed firms over the period 2008–2013. We document a positive and significant effect of both board gender and ethnic diversity on firm value. We also find that the increase in firm value is greater when boards have three or more women directors. In contrast, ethnic minority directors contribute less to firm value when there are three or more on the board. Furthermore, we document that ethnicity has a concave relationship with firm value, but gender does not. We demonstrate that in better‐governed firms, ethnic diversity is more value relevant than gender diversity. Our results also suggest that financial crisis is associated with the propensity to restructure boards along gender and ethnicity. This paper sheds new light on the effect of board diversity in South African firms as the government increasingly pursues policies aimed at eradicating the effects of apartheid. Our results are robust after controlling for self‐selection and various forms of endogeneity.     

The effect of corruption on microfinance loan portfolio: A semiparametric analysis

In this paper, we examine the extent to which corruption affects the loan portfolio of microfinance institutions (MFIs). We employ robust econometric estimation on a sample of 507 MFIs across 63 countries from 2005 to 2018. Our results show that corruption is negatively associated with the loan portfolio. However, in semiparametric analysis, we find that lower-level corruption is beneficial to increase the loan portfolio while higher-level corruption is detrimental. The results imply that it is not just corruption that matters as far as its effect on MFIs' loan portfolio is concerned; what matters is the degree of corruption. In further analyses, we find that corruption reduces both the number of active borrowers and average loan per borrower indicating that corruption reduces both coverage and amount of credit extension. The results suggest that the effect of corruption on the loan portfolio is gender-sensitive. Corruption facilitates an increase in loans to female borrowers. Our results are robust to alternative variable measurements and different identification strategies, including two-stage least square.