Block ownership and CEO compensation: does board gender diversity matter?

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effect of block ownership (institutions and state) on CEO compensation and the extent to which gender diversity in the corporate board moderates this nexus during the period from 2008 to 2016 in all Chinese A-share listed firms. The empirical findings of our study are twofold. First, our results indicate that institutional ownership has a positive and significant impact on CEO compensation, while state ownership has a negative and significant impact on CEO compensation. Second, by analysing the moderating role of gender diversity, our results show that gender diversity negatively (positively) moderates the relationship between institutional (state) ownership and CEO compensation. These findings are robust with the use of an alternative measure of CEO compensation and estimation techniques. Overall, our study supports the resource dependence perspective of the moderating role of board gender diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional ownership
• state ownership
• gender diversity
• CEO compensation
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G34
• G30

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ http://www.ntmarkets.com/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71941008);Funds for High-Level Talents of Xijing University (2019) (XJ19B02).