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Abstract:Previous literature has shown mixed results on the role of female participation on bank boards and bank performance: some find that more women on boards enhance financial performance, while others find negative or no effects. Applying Instrumental Variables methods to data on approximately 90 US bank holding companies over the 1999-2015 period, we argue that these inconclusive results are due to the fact that there is a non-linear, U-shaped relationship between gender diversity on boards and various measures of bank performance: female participation has a positive effect once a threshold level of gender diversity is achieved. Furthermore, this positive effect is only observed in better capitalized banks. Our results suggest that continuing the voluntary expansion of gender diversity on bank boards will be value-enhancing, provided that they are well capitalized.

Previous research on dynamic panel estimation has focused on panels that, unlike a typical panel of macroeconomic data, have small time dimensions and large individual dimensions. We use a Monte Carlo approach to investigate the performance of several different methods designed to reduce the bias of the estimated coefficients for the longer, narrower panels commonly found for macro data. We find that the bias of the least squares dummy variable approach can be significant, even when the time dimension of the panel is as large as 30. For panels with small time dimensions, we find a corrected least squares dummy variable estimator to be the best choice. However, as the time dimension of the panel increases, the computationally simpler Anderson-Hsiao estimator performs equally well. We apply our recommendations to a panel of countries to show that increases in income growth precede increases in savings rates and increases in savings rates precede declines in income growth.

We use a panel of 139 countries to examine the relationship between a country's openness to international trade and several health outcomes and find that, in general, increased openness is associated with lower rates of infant mortality and higher average life expectancies, especially in developing countries. There is some preliminary evidence suggesting that part, but not all, of the positive association between openness and health may result from more open economies receiving more development aid.We are grateful to

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