Women In The Boardroom And Tunneling

Tunneling is one of the biggest problems in China’s capital market, it will not only infringe on the interests of listed companies and minority shareholders, but also hinder the healthy and orderly development of the stock market. In recent years, the ratio of women in the boardroom is growing constantly, and women’s participation in corporate governance is causing for more concern. As a typical problem of corporate governance, It is valuable to discuss the impact of women in the boardroom on tunneling.Based on the principal-agent theory and upper echelons theory, this paper select gender and age of women in the boardroom as main factors, listed companies in Chinese A-share stock market from2003to2012as samples, and then empirically examines the relationship between women in the boardroom and tunneling. The results show that women in the boardroom have a significantly negative impact on tunneling. In particular, the ratio of women in the boardroom is significantly negatively associated with tunneling. Moreover, my paper also reveals that the negative association between women in the boardroom and tunneling is attenuated for elderly women in the boardroom. That is, the older the average age of women in the boardroom is, the smaller the negative effect of women in the boardroom on tunneling is. This finding implies that there is a substitution relationship between gender and age.The contributions of our study are as follows:First, To our knowledge, Chinese scholars rarely address the concern about the impact of gender on tunneling, so this paper fill this gap and provide incremental empirical evidence based on Chinese background. Taking age into account, this paper further examines the substitution effect between gender and age, which expands and enriches extant studies. Second, revealing the impact of women in the boardroom on tunneling will help optimize the operation of the board of directors, strengthen the effective protection of minority shareholders, promote the healthy and sustainable development of the Chinese capital market. Third, study on the impact of the impact of women in the boardroom on tunneling will help the company to improve governance mechanisms, prevent the loss of listed companies, reduce operating costs, improve business performance and market value.