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http://hdl.handle.net/10419/33404
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| Title: | | Diagnosing discrimination: stock returns and CEO gender  |
| Authors: | | Wolfers, Justin |
| Issue Date: | | 2006 |
| Series/Report no.: | | IZA Discussion Papers 1944 |
| Abstract: | | A vast labor literature has found evidence of a glass ceiling, whereby women are under-represented among senior management. A key question remains the extent to which this reflects unobserved differences in productivity, preferences, prejudice, or systematically biased beliefs about the ability of female managers. Disentangling these theories would require data on productivity, on the preferences of those who interact with managers, and on perceptions of productivity. Financial markets provide continuous measures of the market's perception of the value of firms, taking account of the beliefs of market participants about the ability of the men and women in senior management. As such, financial data hold the promise of potentially providing insight into the presence of mistake-based discrimination. Specifically if female-headed firms were systematically under-estimated, this would suggest that female-headed firms would outperform expectations, yielding excess returns. Examining data on S&P 1500 firms over the period 1992-2004 I find no systematic differences in returns to holding stock in female-headed firms, although this result reflects the weak statistical power of our test, rather than a strong inference that financial markets either do or do not under-estimate female CEOs. |
| Subjects: | | discrimination CEOs chief executive officer event study statistical discrimination excess returns female CEOs |
| JEL: | | G14 G3 J16 J4 J7 K31 M5 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | IZA Discussion Papers, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA)
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