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From a business perspective, the health and socio‐economic effects of the COVID‐19 have affected a firm's stakeholders to a different extent, making it necessary for them to develop sustainable initiatives that allow them to meet their needs. Decisions must be made and implemented in a recessionary environment in which companies debate whether it is economically reasonable to promote them and whether they can afford not to do so. In this work, based on the theory of social identity, we argue that these business commitments will have been promoted in companies with boards of directors that have a greater female presence. The results obtained for a sample of 4821 multinationals confirm that the repercussion of incidental affect on the social identity of the in‐group of female directors has partially slowed the setback that business sustainability has suffered due to the pandemic, which is especially important with respect to good governance policies and practices and guaranteeing the social and environmental commitment of previous years. This evidence has important theoretical and practical implications, contributing the current debate on strategic decisions regarding sustainability and the benefits associated with board gender diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether increased female representation on a board improves firm performance in terms of electric vehicle (EV) sales in China when government subsidies are available. The increase in EV sales in China is a direct result of the sustainability efforts spearheaded by the various levels of local and state governments. This area is of importance due to the rising Chinese footprint in global EV sales, the increasing role of subsidies, and a transformation from State‐Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to market‐driven firms that are more likely to pay attention to corporate governance issues such as board diversity. Using the instrumental variable (IV) approach, we estimate a two‐stage least squares (2SLS) regression to control for more women representation on EV boards using firm‐level data. The results indicate that board gender diversity (BGD) positively impacts firm performance in terms of EV sales. Furthermore, the effect amplifies in the presence of government subsidies. The insights provide valuable contributions to bridge the critical literature gap on how board diversity impacts firm performance in the presence of subsidies and offer valuable insights into corporate governance and policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent climate emergency declaration by many nations around the world signifies the severity of the impact of climate change. As an entity which consumes a large quantity of resources ranging from material to human, corporations have a responsibility to seriously tackle climate change. As a company's board of directors is typically responsible for developing business strategies, including environmental strategies, this paper explores whether gender diversity on corporate boards affect firms' emission performance. Consistent with diversity theory, we find that board gender diversity is positively associated with firms' emission reduction performance. The likelihood that a firm with a gender diverse board reduces environmental emission is 9% higher than its industry peers. To ensure that our results are robust to endogeneity, we conduct additional analyses including propensity score matching (PSM), entropy balancing, and instrumental‐variable analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building a sustainable organization is one of the most important goals in business. To build sustainability, firms need to have strong social commitment to establish value‐creating stakeholder relationships. As boards of directors play a critical role in setting strategy, providing management oversight and monitoring, it is also their responsibility to ensure the firm's commitment to its social responsibilities. With the right composition, boards can be effective in driving long‐term vision and creating good stakeholder relationships, contributing to firms' social capital. In this paper, we analyze board characteristics of publicly listed US firms and find evidence that support the diversity theory. In particular, that board gender diversity (proportion of female directors) is positively associated with firms' social commitment to human rights, product responsibility, and their community and workforce, evidencing female directors' contribution to firms' sustainability. To ensure the robustness of our analysis, we conduct additional analyses including propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and instrumental‐variable analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate governance has long been the subject of interest for researchers in business administration. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices decided by boards of directors are now a key issue in the decision‐making process of companies. The relationship between the governance structure and CSR policies is crucial to defining the companies' strategic view. In this paper, we identify how the characteristics of corporate governance impact CSR disclosure. Our findings show that a large board of directors reduces the probability of adhering to practices that involve stakeholders more closely in company activity, while companies with more independent directors have a higher level of stakeholder protection almost by definition. Thus, there is a need for additional ways of involving stakeholders in company activity. Our results also reveal that an overlap between the roles of the CEO and the board chairman is an undesirable influence on a CSR report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at examining the relationship between the board composition and corporate social responsibility (CSR) of a sample of listed financial entities, discussing the reasons driving these entities to disclose CSR information. We hypothesise that there is a positive association between outside (institutional and independent directors) and female directors and CSR disclosure, and a negative relationship between inside directors and CSR reporting. Our findings provide evidence that the presence of independent directors and female directors on boards promotes CSR disclosure. Moreover, the results also show that the presence of inside directors and institutional directors on boards does not have an influence on CSR reporting. Thus, our evidence suggests that board attributes, such as the presence of independent and female directors, encourage financial entities to report CSR matters, showing the effectiveness of these two corporate governance mechanisms. The paper sheds light on the influence of the board structure of financial entities on CSR disclosure. Therefore, this study contributes to past research by providing an index for measuring the CSR disclosure of financial entities and the importance of the distinction between outside and inside directors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adds clarity to inconclusive results in previous literature about the link between board characteristics and the level of social responsibility performance by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. Specifically, we propose a new holistic framework based on the complexity theory. From a sample of 471 non-financial companies from the USA for the period 2008-2010, our findings support the four tenets of complexity theory: equifinality, complexity, asymmetry, and causal asymmetry . More concretely, they suggest that CSR performance depends on a complex configuration of some board characteristics, such as size, independency, diversity and activity, and other corporate attributes (i.e., company size, leverage, and growth opportunities). These factors play a key role as the ingredients of the recipe and, in a proper combination, contribute to obtaining high levels of social responsibility performance. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]