The authors study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in France, Italy, and Spain. The identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in mandated gender quotas within country and over time and uses a counterfactual methodology. Using firm-level accounting data and a difference-in-difference estimator, the authors find that gender quotas had either a negative or an insignificant effect on firm performance in the countries considered with the exception of Italy, where they find a positive impact on productivity. The authors then focus on Italy. Using a novel data set containing detailed information on board members’ characteristics, they offer possible explanations for the positive effect of gender quotas. The results provide an important contribution to the policy debate about the optimal design of legislation on corporate gender quotas.

We analyse the wage gap between temporary and permanent jobs in nine European countries using a semiparametric approach and evaluate the wage gap across the entire wage distribution. We show that in some countries the fixed-term wage gap decreases as higher quantiles are considered, and that having a fixed-term contract penalizes more workers located at the bottom of the earnings distribution. We find also that workers with the same characteristics as temporary workers would receive higher wages if they worked on permanent contracts in almost all the countries considered, and that this finding is stable across the entire wage distribution.

We study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. The empirical analysis is based on accounting panel data from Bureau Van Dijk's Amadeus. Our identification strategy relies on both double and triple difference estimators with ex-ante matching. We find that gender quotas had either a negative or an insignificant effect on firm performance in the countries considered with the exception of Italy, where we find a positive impact on productivity. We then focus on Italy and offer possible explanations for the positive effect of gender quotas using detailed information on board members' characteristics.

In this paper the impact of privatization on macroeconomic performance in the United Kingdom is tested using quarterly data from 1979 to 1999. Privatization proceeds have been included in a simple analytical framework dealing with both demand and supply-side of the economy. Multivariate cointegration techniques have been used in order to consider the nonstationarity of the time series involved. The empirical results show that privatizations have no long-run effects on output in the UK. This result is consistent with microeconomic evidence that shows that in the UK ownership change per se had little impact on long term productivity trends. Moreover it is found that privatization proceeds have contributed to sustaining public expenditures.

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