In recent decades, the contribution of board gender diversity to corporate performance has drawn the interest of researchers, politicians and regulators. This paper examines whether board gender diversity affected the financial performance of 111 Greek listed firms from 2008 to 2020. We use the two-step system GMM estimator to address the endogeneity problem, which is the appropriate method used in governance literature. Our main empirical finding supports the existence of a positive relation between board gender diversity and firm performance. This finding remains robust to three different proxies of gender diversity and under two alternative performance measures, i.e., return on assets and Tobin’s Q. We also find that there is an inverted U-shaped relation between the proportion of female directors and firm performance (measured by Tobin’s Q). Moreover, we find that gender diversity could lead to maximization of corporate performance when female participation in the boardroom reaches 33%. Thus, the imposition of an ad-hoc 25% female representation in corporate boardrooms, dictated by the new Law 4706/2020 on corporate governance, could most probably be an underproductive policy. Our findings have practical implications for Greek regulators and legislators and contribute to the governance literature for the case of companies that operate in a small open economy.

Exchange rate volatility (ERV) affects international tourist flows either by affecting the choices of the potential traveller or the actions of the tourism intermediaries. In this study, we examine the relationship between tourist arrivals and ERV for the UK and Sweden. Our results show that there is a negative relationship between ERV and tourist flows into the two countries suggesting that potential travellers and tour operators react to changes of the exchange rate. Direct policy implications are: policy makers should consider the effects of ERV when designing tourism policy, i.e. countries with substantial tourist inflows from a diversified range of international markets should avoid the opening up of markets that may be exposed to disturbances that could result to ERV. Further, a country relying heavily on its tourism industry, should avoid using exchange rate policies in order to correct its international competiveness, as these policies may end up to an ERV that could reduce substantially its tourism inflows.