Gender Quotas in the Boardroom: New Evidence from Germany

Alexandra Fedorets, Anna Gibert and Norma Burow

No 1810, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: We examine the introduction of a gender quota law in Germany, mandating a minimum 30% of the underrepresented gender on the supervisory boards of a particular type of firms. We exploit the fact that Germany has a two-tier corporate system consisting of the affected supervisory boards and unaffected management boards within the same firm. We find a positive effect on the female share on supervisory boards of affected firms, but no effect on presidency of the board or its size. We also study whether the increased female representation has had an effect on the financial performance of the firm and conclude that, unlike some previous studies in other countries, there has not been any negative effect on the profitability of the firm, neither at the time when the law was announced nor when it was passed.

Keywords: Gender quota; Economics of gender; Labor discrimination; Personnel economics; Firm performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J78 L25 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 p.
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eur, nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.669197.de/dp1810.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1810

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().