| Summary: | Tesis con mención internacional The underrepresentation of women on boards of directors worldwide has stimulated a political and academic debate. Some aspects have been widely analyzed by the academic literature, such as the implications on firm performance of the presence of women on boards (the so-called business-case) or the implications of the enactment of mandatory quotas (hard law), especially the Norwegian quota, on women directors’ characteristics and firm performance. However, other aspects related to gender equality on boards remain almost unexplored. This PhD. thesis aims to contribute to this strand of academic literature by analyzing some relatively unexplored issues that correspond to the determinants, characteristics, and implications of gender diversity on boards. Firstly, it studies how country-level institutional configurations influence the enactment legislation, either soft -codes- or hard -quotas-, that aims to increase the representation of women on boards. Secondly, it addresses how legislation (soft quotas and codes) influences gender diversity on boards, women directors’ attributes, and firm performance. Thirdly, it focuses on firm-level determinants of gender diversity, specifically, how ownership structure, shareholders’ identity, and the control exercised by different kinds of shareholders influence gender diversity on boards. Finally, within the context of family firms, it aims to analyze how female family-affiliated directors contribute to the performance of family firms. The first study describes legislation that aims to promote gender diversity on boards of directors (i.e. codes of good governance with gender recommendations and gender board quotas with –hard- and without –soft- penalties) for a set of European countries. Building on institutional theory and using a balanced panel of 31 European countries (EU-28, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) and 465 observations from 2002-2016, it explores how formal and informal national institutional contexts correspond with the enactment ...
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