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Regulatory mandates by various governments on women representation in company boards play an important role in fulfilling the sustainable development goal 5 (SDG-5 on gender equality) adopted by the members of United Nations. In this paper, we explore the heterogeneity in firm responses to such a regulatory mandate introduced by the Indian government in 2014. We propose that, driven by the need to build legitimacy among internal and external stakeholders, family firms are more likely to comply with the mandate, when compared to non-family firms. However, family firms are also driven by considerations to leverage woman family members and minimize board independence and hence are likely to appoint a woman executive director rather than an independent director. Within a sample of family firms, this pattern of behaviour is more likely among standalone firms when compared to firms belonging to family-owned business groups. We find supportive evidence in a comprehensive panel data sample of 1507 publicly listed Indian firms over a five year period (2013 to 2017), consisting of pre- and post-regulation years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study leverages a natural experiment setting based on the mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) regulation in India to address whether and how CSR spending is influenced by ownership by a family and the heterogeneity in family ownership. Using a longitudinal panel dataset of 1,102 listed firms in India, our study finds that, driven by the motivation to pursue legitimacy-seeking activities and build family legacy, family firms comply better with the CSR regulation. The compliance is further improved for firms belonging to family business groups. We further test our theoretical mechanism by examining the modes of CSR implementation and find that family business group firms and legacy firms tend to use substantive (direct or in-house) modes of implementation. Given the nature of our research setting where the CSR regulation as well as what qualifies for CSR is clearly defined and externally imposed, our study is able to overcome some of the limitations of prior research viz., endogeneity concerns, and inconsistencies in the operationalization of CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]