Time: 13:00-15:00 (UK Time), Wednesday, 1 March 2023
Presenter: Prof. Alessandra Guariglia, University of Birmingham
Chair: Prof. Victor Murinde, SOAS University of London

Abstract
Making use of a panel of Chinese listed firms over the period 2011-2020, we investigate the gender gap in financial constraints based on a difference-in-differences approach. To this end we first use a traditional index (the KZ index) and then construct a new text-based index to measure the financial constraints as perceived respectively by the firm’s CEO and CFO. Our results show that firms with female executives were less financially constrained than their counterparts with male CEOs/CFOs before the Anti-corruption Campaign (ACC). However, this advantage declined or disappeared after the destruction of political connections resulting from the ACC. This suggests that political connections could explain the gender gap in financial constraints observed prior to the ACC. Our results are robust to conducting the estimation on matched samples and to controlling for omitted variables. 

Presenter

Alessandra Guariglia is Professor of Financial Economics at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests range from corporate finance and corporate governance to the economics of transition in China. 

Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Corporate Finance, the Review of Finance, the British Journal of Management, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of International Economics, Social Science and Medicine, and the Journal of Development Economics.  

She is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Climate Finance, co-editor of the Scottish Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, and associate editor of the European Journal of Finance and the British Accounting Review. She has been Head of the Department of Economics at Birmingham from 2012 to 2015, and Head of the Departments of Economics and Accounting & Finance at the University of Durham between 2009 and 2012. Prior to that, she has worked at the Universities of Nottingham, Kent, and Essex.