Gender quotas and the market for corporate directors

Objective

This project investigates how board gender quotas—whether legally mandated or recommended targets—affect the incentives of corporate directors. While existing research has explored the impact of quotas on firm value, corporate strategy, and women’s labour market outcomes, it typically assumes that the incentives of male and female directors remain unchanged. Challenging this assumption, our study employs a gravity model to examine how directors' incentives shift following the introduction of quotas, both within their own countries and across European markets. We first characterise the labour market for directors in Europe, including foreign appointments and potential differences between female and male directors. We then exploit the exogenous changes in labour market conditions induced by quotas to identify gender-specific effects on director behaviour. This action, to be developed at Nova SBE in Portugal, under the supervisor of Prof. Ferreira, will not only address the described relevant research questions as it will also provide training and career development to improve my skills and foster my future career. By joining Nova SBE, I will expand my network and strengthen complementary skills. In turn, I will bring my expertise in empirical corporate finance, corporate governance and banking to significantly expand their research capacity.