This study examines the effects of board gender diversity on a bank’s risk by applying a moderate multiple regression analysis on a dataset covering the years 2008-2017 and comprising 110 banks from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Masculinity, a country-level cultural dimension incorporating the behavioural expectations surrounding men and women in a society, is used as a moderator. Results suggest that high country-level masculinity stresses the risk-aversion of a bank’s women directors, therefore compromising financial performance. To mitigate the negative effects of high country-level masculinity, this paper provides several suggestions. First, banks should change their stereotypical depiction of the “ideal worker”. Second, banks should question the cultural motives underpinning the entrance of women directors in the “boy’s club”. Last, banks should create a more egalitarian workplace where the distribution of rewards does not strengthen the privileges of the established elites.

This paper examines how business families use family foundations to revitalize "dead money" while increasing the reputation of the business family and its firms through charitable giving. The Wang & He (2018) model is applied from 2001 to 2019 to a sample of 100 US family foundations (two for each federal state) with about USD 1 million in assets. Results indicate that business families revitalize "dead money" through family foundations by investing it across different revenue sources, namely bonds, cash investments, and stocks, generating inflows in terms of dividends, interests, and net gains due to asset sales. However, family foundations hold much of these inflows as disposable net equity. Therefore, their administrative structure remains too basic, preventing operating margins from growing. Nonetheless, family foundations stay highly involved in charitable giving to do well to the reputation of the business family and its firms while doing good to society. Overall, we conclude that business families, through family foundations, partially succeed in revitalizing "dead money".

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The paper aims to enrich the academic debate on social impact investing, through a formalization of Development Impact Bonds (DIBs)' structure. With this purpose, the research adopts an inductive approach and presents a case study analysis of the world's first successful DIB in education, Educate Girls Development Impact Bond. The analysis fosters the role of DIBs as tools to provide funds to nonprofit organizations operating in developing countries, by reducing agency problems between investors and social services providers, and by mitigating goal displacement effects.

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