Corporate Governance and Diversity in Boardrooms: Empirical Insights into the Impact on Firm Performance

This book explores diversity in boardrooms to highlight the link between the heterogeneous dimensions of board diversity and their impact on the firms. The book provides a brief definition of corporate governance and focuses on the role and functions of the board of directors. The work contributes to the literature enriching the empirical findings about board diversity. After a deep review of the literature within several theoretical frameworks, such as agency, stakeholder, stewardship, resource dependence, and the institutional theory, the focus moves on the impact on financial performance. The board diversity effects are tested through an empirical analysis conducted on a sample of European listed companies, performing both a single and a joint diversity index analysis. Practitioners and academics will find this book particularly timely and useful as it combines both a review of the literature and robust empirical investigation. It will be an excellent reading for academics and practitioners interested in firm performance, corporate governance and stakeholder theory.

About the Author

Barbara Sveva Magnanelli is Assistant Professor of Accounting and Management at the Department of Business Administration of John Cabot University, Italy. Barbara has previously been a Visiting Researcher at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. Her main research interests are related to corporate governance, with particular regard to the board of directors and financial statement frauds. She has also focused her studies on social enterprises and corporate social responsibility. Barbara teaches Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Financial Reporting, Performance Measurement, and Corporate Governance courses for undergraduate and graduate programs.

Luca Pirolo is Assistant Professor of Management at Luiss Business School – Luiss University, Italy. Luca is the Director of the “Master Degree Programs” at Luiss Business School and the Director of Luiss Creative Business Center.He has been a Visiting Researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden and at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. His research activities can be clustered into two main fields of analysis: the creative and cultural industries, as a field to investigate the relationship between team composition and firm performance, and the corporate governance with a specific focus on the composition of the board of directors.