Testing the Governance Premium: Board Gender Diversity and Crisis-Period Returns During the Pandemic
Graduation Year
2026
Date of Submission
4-2026
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Economics
Reader 1
Murat Binay
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2026 Rhea Kulkarni
Abstract
This paper examines whether board gender diversity predicts cumulative abnormal returns for S&P 1500 firms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Motivated by prior evidence linking board gender diversity to crisis-period stock performance and the broader question of whether governance quality is priced during periods of acute market stress, this study estimates cumulative abnormal returns across three economically distinct event windows covering the crash, recovery, and post-recovery periods using the Carhart (1997) four-factor model to test whether board composition translated into divergent outcomes across firms. The results fail to find evidence that board gender diversity predicts cumulative abnormal returns across any of the four specifications examined, including a pre-crisis placebo period. These findings suggest that crisis-period stock returns may be a limited setting in which to detect the governance effects of board diversity, given the role of policy intervention and outcome variable choice in obscuring firm-level governance signals.
Recommended Citation
Kulkarni, Rhea, "Testing the Governance Premium: Board Gender Diversity and Crisis-Period Returns During the Pandemic" (2026). CMC Senior Theses. 4145.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/4145
