Resumen de Female board representation and corporate acquisition intensity

Guoli Chen, Craig Crossland, Sterling Huang

• This study examines the impact of female board representation on firm-level strategic behavior within the domain of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We build on social identity theory to predict that greater female representation on a firm's board will be negatively associated with both the number of acquisitions the firm engages in and, conditional on doing a deal, acquisition size. Using a comprehensive, multiyear sample of U.S. public firms, we find strong support for our hypotheses. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings through the use of a difference-in-differences analysis on a subsample of firms that experienced exogenous changes in board gender composition as a result of director deaths