Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/33404 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2006
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 1944
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
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

Files in This Item:
File
Size
110.03 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.