Well.. @dragos.. I have built my case on the financial crisis and corporate scandals.. and the fact that women are whistle blowers. Also,studies do show that diversitymakes the board more effecient by eliminating group think mentality -a cause for the corporate scandals 

Hi Lina,

You have to find a proxy for gender diversity and here i suggest using the following:

Two  measures of gender diversity that take into account both the number of gender categories, in this case two i.e. women and men, and the evenness of the distribution of board members in boardrooms.

These two attributes of diversity, referred to as `variety' and `balance', respectively,

may be combined into `dual concept' measures of diversity. These two measure falling in this category are the Blau and Shannon diversity indexes .

For financial transparency, you may use Transparency level(TL), taking the value of 1 if more transparent companies and 0 otherwise.

Then you build up your model as

TL=alpha+beta1(Blau index)+ beta2(Shannon index)+error term

In this case you have to use 'logit' Model.

Hope this helps

Wow.. that makes so much sense Mo! I truly appreciate!

You can refer to the following papers

Does Corporate Governance Influence the

Timeliness of Financial Reporting?

Evidence from UK Private Companies”

Why Diversity Matters

CORPORATE BOARD GENDER DIVERSITY

AND STOCK PERFORMANCE: THE

COMPETENCE GAP OR INSTITUTIONAL

INVESTOR BIAS?

Women in the Boardroom, A study of Major Global Exchanges

Women on Corporate Boards and Financial Reporting Credibility. Evidence from Nigeria

You are very welcome, Lina.

Good luck with your research. 

Thankyou Mo :)..I'll need lots of luck

@Mousavi. . Why diversity matters. .is that by Bushman?

@mo sherrif, i have currently implemented your model as follows:

financial reporting quality=c+female presence(dummy)+female proportion+blauindex+firmsize(control)

Is it ok to apply OLS? So far the relationship is negative.

Hi Lina,

How did you proxy financial reporting quality? Is it 1 and 0?

What kind is your data, is it panel data? do you have  descriptive statistics for your data, for example mean, SD, skewness and kurtosis?

I need this to advise on the methodolgy that you have to use.

Financial reporting quality = (1/total assets t-1)+ (change in revenue -change in receivable) + PPE (t).. I haven't proxied 

It is data for 50 companies over a period of 5 years 

That is fine.

 In this case you have to consider your data as panel data (50 companies x 5 years= 250 observations) and use OLS in addition to fixed effect and random effect. If your data has tails, then you may use generalised method of moments (GMM).

Hope this helps

Will let you know ASAP :) @Mo

@Lina,

Forgot to say that you have to winsorize you data for outliers.

What does that mean? 

I mean you have to clean your data before doing the analysis. For example, any extremely big values should be removed.

Hi,

I think this paper could help you:

K Rao,C Tilt, "Board composition and corporate social responsability: The role of diversity, gender, strategy and decision making", Journal of Business Ethics, 2016, 138, p 327 -347.

Best regards.

Dear Lina,

Just for the discussion section of your study: I am sceptical whether gender diversity can increase board effectiveness and financial statement transparency just because of the gender. We should pay more attention to the circumstaces at place. Please consider this anecdotical evidence:

I am sure that you are familiar with the German carmaker Volkswagen. Well, the wife of the highly controversial board chairman served at the board, too, which caused further controversy, because of her professional background as a nursery teacher (by the way, Volkswagen's total sales in 2015 were over 213 Billion Euro and it employed over 610.000 employees - these are  numbers a nursery teacher usually does not deal with). No doubt, she increased gender diversity of the Volkswagen board, but did she really contribute to financial statement transparency? Perhaps we should pay more attention to the directors' educational and professional background in order to achieve meaningful results.

Paul  

@Lina

For education, you may consider splitting the sample into those with business degree and others. For the level of education, you may go with those with MSc, MBA,..etc.

I know the data is difficult to collect, but BoardEx may have the data (http://corp.boardex.com/data/). I can send you a paper on this if you wish.

HI,

You may have a look on this paper:

The impact of board gender composition on dividend payouts

In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 5 January 2017 journal of Corporate Finance 2017 forthcoming

Jie Chen, Woon Sau Leung, Marc Goergen

Best regards