The impact of board gender composition on dividend payouts

By Jie Chen, Woon Sau Leung, M. Goergen. 2017

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates whether female independent directors are more likely to impose high dividend payouts. We find evidence that firms with a larger fraction of female directors on their board have greater dividend payouts. This finding is robust to alternative econometric specifications, and alternative measures of dividend payouts and female board representation. The positive effect of board gender composition on dividends remains when we employ propensity score matching, the instrumental variable approach, and difference-in-differences approach to address potential endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, we find that board gender composition significantly increases the dividend payout only for firms with weak governance, suggesting that female directors use dividend payouts as a governance device.

Subfields: Accounting, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9616e86e6fcc249052d82e6834a2ce51ae37834

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

In Gender Studies

Citations in the corpus

Does board gender diversity affect corporate cash holdings? (2019, positive): “Our selection of control variables is based on previous studies (e.g., Adams & Ferreira, 2009; Liu et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2017).”
Gender diversity in boardroom and its impact on firm performance (2021, background): “…emerging literature on gender diversity has used proportion of women on board (Adams & Ferreira, 2009; Appiadjei et al., 2017; Carter et al, 2003; Chen et al., 2017; Darmadi, 2011; Erhardt et al., 2003) and a dummy variable indicating the presence of women/minorities on board (Carter et al.,…”
Corporate governance and dividend pay-out policy in UK listed SMEs: The effects of corporate board characteristics (2017, positive): “By contrast, and based on the view of the substitute hypothesis, firms with combined leadership structure are expected to pay larger dividends in order to substitute for poor governance quality often associated with CEO role duality (Chen et al., 2016).”
Does board gender diversity affect renewable energy consumption? (2020, methodology): “responsive to calls for greater board gender diversity (Chen et al., 2017).”
The impact of top executive gender on asset prices: Evidence from stock price crash risk (2019, positive): “We construct variable Female DirectorT , the ratio of female independent director number to the board size (Chen et al., 2017), for 10,172 firm-year observations and 1,601 unique firms in our main sample.”
Does gender diversity on banks' boards matter? Evidence from public bailouts (2020, background): “…al., 2002; Peterson and Philpot, 2007; Francoeur et al., 2008; Adams and Funk, 2012) and in the finance literature (Campbell and Mínguez-Vera, 2008; Cheng, 2008; Adams and Ferreira, 2009; Ahern and Dittmar, 2012; Liu et al., 2014), probably due to discrepancies in the institutional and legal…”
The Monitoring Role of Female Directors Over Accounting Quality (2017, neutral): “…indicating that female directors behave differently than their male counterparts particularly in terms of risk-aversion (e.g., Levi et al., 2014) or dividend payout policies (Chen et al. 2017), and suggesting lower performance in firms with greater board diversity (Adams and Ferreira, 2009).”