Programme de la conférence

The paper presents empirical evidence of cyclical fluctuations in the proportion of women on executive boards. While extant research has primarily focused on the importance of gender diversity on firm performance, limited attention has been devoted to examining its development and relation to macroeconomic conditions.

Our analysis uses data of 105 publicly listed firms in the manufacturing sector in Germany. We use the balance sheet information from Amadeus (2011 to 2021), matched to the board members' data from the German commercial register since 2005. Our matched sample consists of 3,458 quarterly firm-level observations.

The average female share on executive boards in our sample increased from 2 percent in 2005 to 6.6 percent in 2020. This positive time trend is driven by a rise in the number of firms with at least one female board member (from 4.8 percent to 27 percent), and also the increase in the female shares within a firm (the 90th percentile increased from 0 to 0.25).

We further find evidence that the increase in the female share is not monotonic but fluctuates with the business cycle after controlling for firm characteristics. On average, a 1 percent decrease in real GDP from its trend is associated with a 1.2 percentage point decrease in the female share, with a quarter lag. Notably, this procyclical nature of the female share decreases with firm size. A firm with 1 percent fewer employees exhibits a stronger response in the female share by approximately 7.15 percent to that negative change in GDP. Consequently, the smaller firms up to the third quartile of size in terms of employees are driving the procyclical pattern of female share.

Our survival analysis of 1,124 board members in the individual-level sample presents a consistent finding. It demonstrates that on average, females exhibit a 3.38 times higher hazard rate of leaving, resulting in a shorter average job duration by half a year compared to their male counterparts. We further find that the gender gap in hazard rate is heterogeneous in the economic condition: the hazard rate of women is 3.2 times higher than the one of men when GDP is above its trend, whereas this gender gap even increases by 27.5 percent when GDP is below its trend.

Since March 2022, the Federal Reserve has raised the federal funds rate to combat inflation. Actions of the Fed have raised concerns about a possibility of a ‘hard’ landing with potential implications for the labor market. It has already been well established in the literature that race and gender intersection create unique experiences for race and gender groups in the labor market. In this paper, I investigate the impact of monetary policy on labor market outcomes including labor force participation rate, unemployment rate, and employment rates of White, Black, and Hispanic workers disaggregated by gender from 1973 to 2022 by utilizing VAR analyses. I will also consider the impact of monetary tightening on the employment of sectors predominantly employing African Americans and Latinx workers.

Female-owned businesses continue to be smaller and less profitable than male-owned firms. We conduct an RCT in Ghana on a sample of 1,771 growth-oriented female entrepreneurs to investigate the effect of online networking groups on firm performance.We find that access to online networking opportunities leads to greater innovation, better business practices and higher profits by 21%. The increase in profit  is concentrated in the upper tail of the distribution. The treatment shifts business collaborations from friends and family members to business network members in the intervention. We find the largest effects for those in groups with more-educated, higher-quality, and more

diverse entrepreneurs. Our findings reveal that a low-cost, light-touch online intervention that increases networking opportunities can effectively improve outcomes of female-owned  rms.

The paper explores the role of gender norms and soft skills on entrepreneurial performances of men and women owned businesses in Ghana. Using data from the 2022 Ghana Informal Sector Measurement Survey and a series of OLS regressions, we find that women who are particularly traditional have worse business performance outcomes. Soft skills like being organised, work centrality and a focus on high achievement are important for women’s firm outputs, while impulsiveness hurts men’s businesses. Men’s businesses performed better when owners did not have to juggle multiple tasks, when they had a high degree of power motivation, and when work was central to their lives. Tests for moderation effects showed that although more traditional women performed worse compared to more liberal women, women who were traditional but high-achieving, optimistic and with a higher locus of control performed better. The paper finds that beyond traditional business skills, personal initiative training to enhance men and women’s soft skills would be beneficial to small business enterprise performance in Ghana. Culture and underlying gender norms are also found to play a pivotal role in the success or failure of businesses in Ghana. These findings highlight the importance of designing policies that take into consideration the gender role attitudes of the population. Despite being in the majority, women’s businesses tend to perform worse than their male counterparts. Policies that aim to increase the performance of women’s businesses need to consider what are the main barriers are, especially the “social norms” that may determine how women operate in these settings.