Women in finance

Across countries, banks have less gender diverse boards than other firms. Bank board diversity is particularly low in countries with greater gender gaps in PISA math scores and lower average math scores. We find similar results using state-level NAEP math scores in the United States. The influence of math scores appears to transcend standard cultural explanations. Female directors are more likely to have an MBA in banks, especially in countries with greater gender gaps in math scores. Our evidence suggests that differences in educational outcomes for boys and girls may have long-lasting implications for their career development

Say on pay: do shareholders care?

This paper examines the impact of enhanced executive remuneration disclosure rules under UK regulations introduced in 2013 on the voting pattern of shareholders. Based on a hand-collected dataset on the pay information disclosed by FTSE 100 companies, we establish that shareholders guide their vote by top line salary, and appear to disregard the remaining substantial body of information provided to them. Analyzing the unique British feature of two votes, one forward looking and one backward looking, we establish that shareholders differentiate between the two dimensions in about 23% of the cases. In contrast to the rationale of the legislation that introduced the two votes, however, differentiating voting behavior is not driven by characteristics of the executive's remuneration policy, but mainly by exceptionally positive future performance expectations

The effect of police response time on crime detection

Police agencies devote vast resources to minimising the time that it takes them to attend the scene of a crime. Despite this, the long-standing consensus is that police response time has no meaningful effect on the likelihood of catching offenders. We revisit this question using a uniquely rich dataset from the Greater Manchester Police. To identify causal effects, we exploit discontinuities in distance to the response station across locations next to each other, but on different sides of division boundaries. Contrary to previous evidence, we find large and strongly significant effects: in our preferred estimate, a 10% increase in response time leads to a 4.6 percentage points decrease in the likelihood of detection. A faster response time also decreases the number of days that it takes for the police to detect a crime, conditional on eventual detection. We find stronger effects for thefts than for violent offenses, although the effects are large for every type of crime. We identify the higher likelihood that a suspect will be named by a victim or witness as an important mechanism though which response time makes a difference

Commuting for Crime

People care about crime, with the spatial distribution of both actual and perceived crime affecting the amenities from living in different areas and residential decisions. The literature finds that crime tends to happen close to the offender’s residence but does not clearly establish whether this is because the location of likely offenders and crime opportunities are close to each other or whether there is a high commuting cost for criminals. We use a rich administrative dataset from one of the biggest UK police forces to disentangle these two hypotheses, providing an estimate of the cost of distance and how local socio-economic characteristics affect both crimes that are committed and the offenders’ location. We find that the cost of distance is very high and has a great deterrence effect. We also propose a procedure for controlling for the selection bias induced by the fact that offenders’ location is only known when they are caught

Measuring management insulation from shareholder pressure

We propose a management insulation measure based on charter, bylaw, and corporate law provisions that make it difficult for shareholders to oust a firm’s management. Unlike the existing alternatives, our measure considers the interactions between different provisions. We illustrate the usefulness of our measure with an application to the banking industry. We find that banks in which managers were more insulated from shareholders in 2003 were significantly less likely to be bailed out in 2008/09. These banks were also less likely to be targeted by activist shareholders, as proxied by 13D SEC filings. By contrast, popular alternative measures of insulation -- such as staggered boards and the Entrenchment Index -- fail to predict both bailouts and shareholder activism