Gender & Finance presented at the Department of Finance at the University of Lausanne and the Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL

 

Gender & Finance recently presented its research at the research seminar in finance of the University of Lausanne and the Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL: Is Gender in the Pocket of Investors? Identifying Gender Homophily Towards CEOs in a Lab Experiment on December 4th 2020. The presentation took place online due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Gender & Finance Co-founder and Associate Professor Estefania Santacreu-Vasut presented experimental research on the stock market reaction to CEO appointments as function of gender.

We received interesting feedback from PhD students and Professors.

Three stylized facts

At the seminar, we motivated our research with three stylized facts:

Fact #1: Women are under-represented in CEO positions.

Fact #2: Stock markets in the US react more negatively to the appointment of a female CEO than to that of male CEO.

Fact #3: Women are under-represented also in finance related educational and professional arenas.

We presented how our research can provide a unified explanation of the three stylized facts.

• To do so, we unify three theoretical explanations: gender stereotypes, double standards and in-group biases.
• We build a trading experiment to study how individual investors react to CEO appointments
• We causally identify the role of investors preferences and quantify the role of investors’ gender diversity on the aggregate stock market reaction
• In short, we find evidence of gender homophily among investors which can rationalize the relation between facts #1, #2 and #3

Slides

Contact us for more information or for research collaborations! And check our presentation slides!

Prof. François Longin and Prof. Santacreu-Vasut
ESSEC Business School