RT info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
T1 Board Diversity and Firm Performance: Director Roles, Expertise, and Gender Quotas in European Corporate Governance
A1 Hernández Atienza, Fernando
A2 Universidad de Valladolid. Escuela de Doctorado
K1 Economía financiera
K1 Governance
K1 Gobernanza
K1 Board of Directors
K1 Consejo de Administración
K1 5311.02 Gestión Financiera
AB This doctoral dissertation examines when and how board diversity translates into value creation. It integrates three empirical studies covering: (i) demographic and educational diversity by director role, (ii) professional expertise and expertise diversity among independent directors, and (iii) the effects of gender quotas on boards in an international setting. The research builds primarily on agency theory and resource dependence theory, and complements these perspectives with arguments from group-process research and institutional contingency. The overarching goal is to explain why prior evidence on the diversity–performance link is often mixed and strongly context-dependent.Study 1 analyzes listed non-financial European firms using a 2007–2018 panel (15,471 firm-year observations), combining board composition data with financial information. Its key contribution is to explicitly distinguish between executive, non-executive, and independent directors and to measure diversity at each governance layer. This enables a comparison of mechanisms by role: executives are more closely related to strategic decision-making and resource provision, whereas non-executive and independent directors primarily contribute through monitoring and advising. The results show that diversity is not uniformly beneficial: some attributes are associated with higher valuation only under specific conditions (including potential threshold effects), while others are neutral or negative across several specifications. Moreover, when Tobin’s Q is replaced by ROA, part of the market-based effects weakens, suggesting that market measures incorporate governance expectations and signaling effects that may not be fully reflected in short-run accounting profitability.Study 2 focuses on Spain and develops a novel measure of expertise and expertise diversity for independent directors using biographical information disclosed in Annual Corporate Governance Reports (2004–2020). A subset of biographies is manually annotated across fourteen non-mutually exclusive experience dimensions, allowing multidimensional profiles to be captured and aggregated at the board level. In the econometric panel (with governance covariates available from 2007 onward), expertise diversity is positively associated with market valuation, with meaningful industry heterogeneity: the effects are stronger in complex and dynamic industries, where a broader set of skills and networks is particularly valuable.Study 3 evaluates gender quota policies in 31 countries (2004–2023; 301,116 firm-year observations), distinguishing between hard and soft regimes and applying difference-in-differences estimators for staggered adoption. The findings indicate that both quota types increase female representation, albeit with different temporal dynamics, and that performance effects are contingent on context, varying with cultural and institutional moderators.Overall, the dissertation concludes that board diversity creates value in a contingent manner: it depends on the specific attribute, directors’ roles, possible non-linearities, and the institutional environment. These results carry implications for firms, investors, and regulators by highlighting the need to align board composition, skills, and regulatory design with the strategic and monitoring demands of each context.
YR 2026
FD 2026
LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/84314
UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/84314
LA spa
NO Escuela de Doctorado
DS UVaDOC
RD 29-abr-2026