The Effect of female directors on the informativeness of stock prices.

Abstract

During the current thesis, the effect of female directors on the informativeness of stock prices and specifically on the tendency to delay the release of bad news will be examined. The existing literature has been examined and it seems that there is evidence that the female presence on the board of directors has a positive effect on various financial and market characteristics. Based on this, we expect that female directors are associated with weaker market reaction to the release of bad news. For the analysis, we used daily data on announcements and forecasts and have only used the observations that have negative values, which reflect the bad news. Then, the effect of women directors will be examined over the bad news and will then proceed with the conclusions of this research. In contrast with the existing literature, it seems that we find in all models used for the purposes of the analysis that the presence of female directors in the boardroom has a negative effect, which suggests that in the presence of female directors, firms do not disclose their bad news timely enough.