Gender quotas and the environment: Environmental performance and enforcement

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between the implementation of mandatory gender quotas on boards and companies' environmental indicators for Italian listed firms from 2010 to 2018. First, based on the upper echelon and resource dependence theories, we expect that the resources provided by female directors appointed under a coercive legal approach will lead to a reduction in firms' greenhouse gas emissions and an increase in recycled waste. These resources are mainly based on female personality, backgrounds and environmental commitment, which improve firms' environmental decision-making. Second, based on the gender socialisation and overconfidence theories, we expect that women's attention to stakeholders and experts will be negatively related to firms' environmental violations, which result in litigation and penalties. To test our hypotheses we used a content analysis and a staggered difference-in-difference multivariate regression model. Our results confirm our expectations for environmental performance and litigation, but not for penalties.

Does sustainable board governance drive corporate social responsibility? A structured literature review on European archival research

“…Referring to single-country studies, most of the included studies stressed a positive link between gender diversity and environmental outputs. This is the case for mandatory regimes in France (Burkhardt et al , 2020; Baalouch et al , 2019; Galia et al , 2015), Italy (Cosma et al , 2021; Marchini et al , 2022) and the UK as a voluntary gender diversity regime (Al-Qahtani and Elgharbawy, 2020 (carbon reporting); Tingbani et al , 2020 (carbon reporting); Haque, 2017 (carbon performance); Tauringana et al , 2017 (environmental offences). Only two studies one in Italy (Caputo et al , 2021) and one in the UK (Liao et al , 2015 (carbon reporting) did not find any significant relationships.…”

How top managers’ sport experience exploits environmental proactivity in state-owned enterprises.

“…According to the upper echelon theory (UET), how enterprises operate critically depends on TMs, whose decisions are influenced by their psychological traits (Arena et al, 2018;Liao & Long, 2018;Pryor et al, 2019;Shahab et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2019). Furthermore, an individual's psychological traits are majorly shaped by their prior experiences (Allen et al, 2013;Cho et al, 2019;Marchini et al, 2022), such as birth (Ren et al, 2021), education (Hörisch et al, 2017;Cho et al, 2019), and employment (Wang et al, 2022).…”

“…We controlled several dimension variables, mainly including accounting factors (Marchini et al, 2022), financial market factors, and governance factors (Husted & Sousa-Filho, 2019;Marchini et al, 2022). First, the accounting factors consider 1) the firm size (lnAsst it ), measured as the natural logarithm of a firm's total assets; 2) revenue (lnRvn it ), measured as the natural logarithm of a firm's revenue; 3) profit (ROA it ), measured as the return on asset ratio; 4) leverage (Lvrg it ), measured as debts divided by assets; and 5) growth (Growth it ), measured as growth ratio of sales.…”

Reporting on sustainable development: Configurational effects of top management team and corporate characteristics on environmental information disclosure

“…According to the resource dependence theory (Hillman & Dalziel, 2003;Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), corporations shape their environmental information disclosure (EID) strategies by organizing their resources as a response to the external pressure (Li et al, 2022). The top management team (TMT) is a strategic set of resources at the service of the corporation (Marchini et al, 2022). Specifically, the valued strategic resources that the TMT contributes to the corporation involve their skills, experience, and knowledge (Orazalin & Baydauletov, 2020).…”

“…Therefore, EID is closely related to the characteristics of both TMT (Tingbani et al, 2020) and corporation (D'Amico et al, 2016). A burgeoning literature integrates both upper echelons theory and resource dependency theory to better reflect the characteristics of resources available to the corporation as well as their impact on EID strategies (Marchini et al, 2022;Orazalin & Baydauletov, 2020).…”