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.

This research investigates the relationship between ethnic diversity in the boardroom and the ESG performance of US banks during the 2016-2021 period. To this aim, we implement the 2-step system GMM estimation technique, which addresses endogeneity issues that have posed challenges in many studies. Our findings indicate that boardroom ethnic diversity negatively influences ESG performance. Moreover, in a nonlinear analysis, we provide evidence of a U-shaped relationship between boardroom ethnic diversity and the ESG performance of banks. These results remain robust when, instead of ESG performance, we examine the social and corporate governance performance of banks. We also demonstrate that the impact of boardroom ethnic heterogeneity on ESG performance varies with bank size. Furthermore, we reveal that during the pandemic, the previously negative impact of ethnically diverse directors on ESG performance shifts and ultimately becomes positive. Consequently, our conclusions serve as an important source of information to lawmakers and regulators and enrich the corporate governance research concerning the nexus between board characteristics and ESG performance.

We investigate the influence of boardroom gender diversity on earnings management. Drawing on a sample of European firms over the 2010–2023 period, we document an inverted U-shaped nexus between boardroom gender heterogeneity and earnings manipulation. Moreover, we also find that the Democracy Index moderates the curvilinear nexus by flattening the inverted U-curve and shifting the inflection point leftward. Our findings are consistent across various measures of earnings management and different econometric approaches, offering valuable insights for European policymakers.