Impact of board gender diversity on firm value: International evidence. This paper focuses on the impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. Using a sample of 880 listed firms in 10 developed countries covering a nine year period, we find that gender diversity has a negative effect on firm market performance. | Journal of Economics and Development, , , April 2017, pp. 65-76 ISSN 1859 0020 Impact of Board Gender Diversity on Firm Value: International Evidence Vo Thi Thuy Anh University of Economics - the University of Da Nang, Vietnam Email: vothuyanh@ Bui Phan Nha Khanh University of Economics - the University of Da Nang, Vietnam Email: khanhbpn@ Abstract This paper focuses on the impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. Using a sample of 880 listed firms in 10 developed countries covering a nine year period, we find that gender diversity has a negative effect on firm market performance. The result is consistent when different robustness checks are employed. A negative correlation can be explained by the fact that the presence of women on boards increases monitoring function. When the investors’ rights are well protected by the legal system, this extra monitoring may be costly for firms. This finding suggests that a quota for the exact anticipation of female directors on boards should be carefully considered. Keywords: Corporate governance; board gender diversity; firm performance; homogeneous effect. Journal of Economics and Development 65 Vol. 19, , April 2017 1. Introduction relationship changes in respond to an economic environmental shock or in different institutional environment. The presence of women on a firm’s board might increase board monitoring and then improve shareholders’ rights. Nevertheless, firm value is only better off if its marginal benefit of the monitoring is higher than its marginal cost of additional monitoring. Besides, if the shareholders’ rights are well protected by the legal system or country level governance, the additional monitoring becomes costlier and inefficiently used thereby reducing firm value. Supporting this idea, we concentrate on the sample of more than one thousand firms in ten well developed western and eastern countries, including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, .
