In 2018, California became the first U.S. state to introduce a mandatory board gender quota for all firms headquartered in the state. Even though the constitutionality of the law is still debated, we document large negative announcement returns of -2.6% to the adoption of the gender quota for...

Fund companies regularly send shareholder letters to their investors. We use textual analysis to investigate whether these letters matter for fund flows and whether they predict performance and investment styles. We find that fund investors react to the writing style of shareholder letters; a...

We show that CEOs of prestigious firms earn less. Total compensation is on average 8% lower for firms listed in Fortune's ranking of America's most admired companies. We suggest that CEOs are willing to trade off status and career benefits from working for a publicly admired company against...

We analyze the long-term effects of living under communism and its anticapitalist doctrine on households’ financial investment decisions and attitudes towards financial markets. Utilizing comprehensive German brokerage data and bank data, we show that, decades after Reunification, East Germans...

We document significantly lower inflows in female-managed funds than in male-managed funds. This result is obtained with field data and with data from a laboratory experiment. We find no gender differences in performance. Thus, rational statistical discrimination is unlikely to explain the fund...

This paper shows that local institutional investors are effective monitors of corporate behavior. Firms with high local ownership have better internal governance and are more profitable. These firms are also less likely to manage their earnings aggressively or backdate options and are less...

The gender pension gap in Germany amounts on average to 26 %. It starts to form at the age of 35 years. When entering retirement, women need an extra amount of roughly 25,000 Euro in nominal terms if they aim at closing this gap. A 40 year old woman would have to save an extra 2.3% of her annual...

We show that competitive female role models reduce women's perceived stereotype threat and increase their willingness to compete. Competitive male role models have the opposite effect. They seem to discourage women from competing and, as a result, the gender gap in tournament entry increases....

We investigate the impact of government-provided child care on women's careers. Using a unique employer-employee matched data set from Germany, we find that mothers in low child care counties experience a 25% larger earnings penalty than mothers in high child care counties. This penalty is...

This paper shows that equity analysts exhibit in-group favoritism and have less-favorable views about firms headed by out-of-group CEOs. Using gender to identify group, we find that, compared with female analysts, male analysts have lower earnings forecasts and worse stock recommendations for...