Managing bank liquidity hoarding during uncertain times: The role of board gender diversity

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of executive board gender diversity on the relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and bank liquidity hoarding (LH). We focus on the Russian banking sector, which, relative to most of the world, has a high share of women on bank executive boards. Using the news-based EPU index developed by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) and LH measures proposed by Berger, Guedhami, Kim, and Li (2022), we exploit a unique dataset from the Russian banking sector. While higher economic policy uncertainty tends to increase liquidity hoarding, we find that this effect diminishes as the gender diversity of the board increases. We attribute this finding to the moderating influence of gender diversity on stability and overreaction in decision-making. Additionally, we find that the channel through which board gender diversity affects the impact of economic policy uncertainty on liquidity hoarding takes place via the hoarding of liquid assets. Our findings are robust to the use of alternative measures for economic policy uncertainty and gender diversity and hold after addressing endogeneity concerns. As women are still significantly under-represented on bank boards in most countries, these results argue for policies to promote gender diversity on bank boards as a means of limiting the detrimental effects of economic policy uncertainty.