Female Board Representation and Corporate Acquisition Intensity

• Main Authors: CHEN, Guoli, CROSSLAND, Craig, HUANG, Sterling
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Board characteristics; director gender; mergers and acquisitions; corporate governance; strategic leadership; Accounting; Corporate Finance; Human Resources Management
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/1273; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soa_research/article/2272/viewcontent/Female_board_representation_and_corporate_acquisition_intensity.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This study examines the impact of female board representation on firm-level strategic behavior within the domain of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We build on social identity theory to predict that greater female representation on a firm's board will be negatively associated with both the number of acquisitions the firm engages in and, conditional on doing a deal, acquisition size. Using a comprehensive, multi-year sample of U.S. public firms, we find strong support for our hypotheses. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings through the use of a difference-in-differences analysis on a sub-sample of firms that experienced exogenous changes in board gender composition as a result of director deaths