Do Board Gender Quotas Matter? Selection, Performance, and Stock Market Effects

From business to politics and academia, the economic effects of gender quotas are under scrutiny. We provide new causal evidence based on the introduction of mandatory gender quotas for boards of directors of Italian listed companies. Exploiting staggered board elections, we find that quotas are associated with a new selection of board members, characterized by higher education and lower age, and no significant costs on firm performance or the stock market. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.