Board Diversity and Financial Performance in the Top 500 Australian Firms

Alireza Vafaei, Kamran Ahmed and Paul Mather

Australian Accounting Review, 2015, vol. 25, issue 4, 413-427

Abstract: type="main">

Recent regulatory changes in Australia require listed companies to implement policies for increasing board diversity and to report thereon. In this paper we examine the association between gender diversity on corporate boards and the financial performance of a large sample of the top 500 listed companies in Australia during the period 2005–2011, addressing many of the methodological weaknesses in prior studies. Our descriptive statistics show that the proportion of female directors on boards increased markedly between 2010, when ASX amended principles came into effect, and 2011. The results also show that board diversity is positively associated with financial performance after controlling for a number of firm-specific, ownership and governance characteristics and potential endogeneity with the two-stage least square tests. Thus, we inform the policy debate by providing empirical evidence supporting the business case for board diversity.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/auar.12068 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:bla:ausact:v:25:y:2015:i:4:p:413-427

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1035-6908

Access Statistics for this article

Australian Accounting Review is currently edited by Linda M. English

More articles in Australian Accounting Review from CPA Australia
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().