Changing the Board Game: Horizontal Spillovers of Gender Quotas

Luigi Guiso, Fabiano Schivardi and Luana Zaccaria

No 19492, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: The success of board quotas regulation in promoting gender balance hinges on whether its effect extends beyond the (few) firms and jobs directly targeted by law. So far, research has found no evidence of vertical spillovers, that is, indirect effects on workers within targeted firms. We study horizontal spillovers, i.e., the effects on boards of firms not directly targeted by the quotas. We examine the 2011 Italian law mandating gender quotas on boards of listed and state-controlled enterprises (target companies). We define “connected†firms as non-target companies that shared at least one board member with target companies prior to the reform. Employing a difference in differences design, we find that connected firms significantly increase the share of female board members post-reform compared to similar non-connected firms. Accounting for these horizontal spillovers, the effect of the reform on the number of female directors is at least twice as large as that computed for target firms alone, which amounts to approximately 2,500 additional women on boards. Our results suggest that the quotas law indirectly expanded the supply of candidates for directorship positions available to connected firms, rather than increasing their demand for gender diversity on the board. We show evidence that the spillover is largely due to information sharing between target and connected firms.

JEL-codes: J24 J7 J78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19492 (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:cpr:ceprdp:19492

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19492

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().