Female leadership, performance, and governance in microfinance institutions

Reidar Øystein Strøm, D’Espallier, Bert and Roy Mersland

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2014, vol. 42, 60-75

Abstract: This paper investigates the relations between female leadership, firm performance, and corporate governance in a global panel of 329 Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in 73 countries covering the years 1998–2008. The microfinance industry is particularly suited for studying the impact of female leadership on governance and performance because of its mission orientation, its entrepreneurial nature, diverse institutional conditions, and high percentage of female leaders. We find female leadership to be significantly associated with larger boards, younger firms, a non-commercial legal status, and more female clientele. Furthermore, we find that a female chief executive officer and a female chairman of the board are positively related to MFI performance, but this result is not driven by improved governance.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/324007/3/F ... nce-institutions.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:zbw:espost:324007

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().