Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship and Firm Performance in Developing Countries

Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso

No 2017/14, Working Papers from Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain)

Abstract: This paper uses firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) to investigate productivity gaps between female and male-managed companies in developing countries. We depart from the previous literature by using the gender of the top manager as target variable, which is newly available in the 2016 version of the WBES. The main results indicate that it is crucial to distinguish between female management and female ownership and also the confluence between both. We find that when the firms are managed by females and there are not female owners, they show a higher average labour productivity and total factor productivity. However, if females are among the owners and a female is the top manager, then their productivity is lower than for other firms. These results are very heterogeneous among regions. In particular, results in South Saharan Africa, East Asia and South Asia seems to be driving the general results

Keywords: firm performance; gender gap; developing countries; top manager; TFP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 O15 O44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-ent, nep-gen and nep-sbm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jau:wpaper:2017/14

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