Abstract
A growing body of research suggests that the composition of a firm’s board of directors can influence its environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. In the banking industry, ESG performance has not yet been explored to discover how a critical mass of women on the board of directors affects performance. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by testing the impact of a critical mass of female directors on ESG performance. Other board characteristics are accounted for: independence, size, frequency of meetings and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sustainability committee. We use fixed effects panel regression models on a sample of 108 listed banks in Europe and the United States for the period 2011–2016. Our main empirical evidence shows that the relationship between women on the board of directors and a bank’s ESG performance is an inverted U-shape. Therefore, the critical mass theory for banks is not supported, confirming that only gender-balanced boards positively impact a bank’s performance for sustainability. There is a positive link between ESG performance and board size or the presence of a CSR sustainability committee, while it is negative with the share of independent directors. With this work, we stress the key role of corporate governance principles in banks’ ESG performance, with relevant implications for both banks and supervisory authorities.
Subject
Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law,Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment,Geography, Planning and Development
Reference114 articles.
1. Board of Directors and CSR in Banking: The Moderating Role of Bank Regulation and Investor Protection Strength
2. BCBS—Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, Guidelines. Corporate Governance Principles for Banks, July 2015,2015
3. HLEG—High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance Financing a Sustainable European Economy, Interim Report 2017https://ec.europa.eu/info/publications/170713-sustainable-finance-report_en
4. The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance
5. HLEG—High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance Financing a Sustainable European Economy, Final Report 2018https://ec.europa.eu/info/publications/180131-sustainable-finance-report_en
Cited by
147 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献