Purpose This paper aims to determine the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting of listed banks and female representation on boards while controlling for the impact of gender quotas. Design/methodology/approach Logistic regressions are used with bank fixed effects on a global sample of 285 commercial banks from 2005 to 2017. Findings There exists a positive association between the proportion of women on board and banks’ CSR disclosure. Positive association remains also after quota corrections for banks with either below- or above-quota female representation. Further, adding more women to boards than required by quota could affect boards’ CSR reporting in masculine countries but not in feminine countries. Research limitations/implications The results are not generalizable to smaller listed banks and the used estimation approach does not enable to detect causality. Practical implications Policymakers interested in improving banks’ CSR reporting could introduce gender quotas. Social implications Gender quotas can enforce banks’ sustainable behaviour. Originality/value First, it is the first study to thoroughly control for gender quotas while investigating the association between female representation on boards and CSR disclosure. Second, this paper moves forward from the so-far predominant concentration on single-country studies on banks’ CSR reporting. Third, this paper covers the aspect of a country’s masculinity-femininity as a factor that could influence the association between CSR disclosure and female representation.

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PurposeThe authors examine the performance of individual global equity funds in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and separate the skill of their fund managers from luck.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use cross-sectional bootstrap simulations to study the monthly net and gross returns of 175 funds over the period September 2005 to December 2019. Simulations are applied to three, four, and five-factor asset pricing models, and to regressions run on fund-specific benchmark indexes. The authors also examine the value added by all funds and by fund size groups.FindingsUsing multifactor models, a majority of the individual funds fail to deliver alpha, both net and gross of fees; whereas, most of the negative alphas appear due to poor skills, not bad luck. Relative to benchmark indexes, about 5% of the sample shows skill only gross of fees, indicating that fund management fees absorb this skill. As a whole, global equity funds in CEE add more economic value than they destroy, gross of fees, which is largely driven by large funds.Practical implicationsMarket-tracking passive indexes are the most reliable choice for investors who want to maximise their risk-adjusted returns at the lowest possible cost. However, investors with a high level of risk appetite might prefer small actively managed funds in CEE when market conditions are stable or growing. Investors who are less risk tolerant might prefer large actively managed funds.Originality/valueThis is the first study to shed light on the presence of skill in mutual fund returns in CEE.