Board gender diversity and investment inefficiency

This paper investigates the effect of board gender diversity on a firm's investment inefficiency and finds that a firm with at least one female director on its board has significantly less investment inefficiency than firms without one. The fraction of female directors on the board has a significantly negative association with investment inefficiency. The instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching show that this relation is robust after addressing endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, the effect of board gender diversity on investment inefficiency is more pronounced for overinvestment than underinvestment. Consistently, the effect is more substantial for firms that tend to overinvest ex-ante. It also indicates that board independence is a channel for board gender diversity to reduce investment inefficiency.