Do women on corporate boards influence corporate social performance? A control function approach

We examine if women on corporate boards (WOCB) influence a firm's corporate social performance (CSP). To do this, we utilize stakeholder theory. From an empirical standpoint, we use the control function (CF) approach suggested by Wooldridge (2015), which takes into account the issue of endogeneity raised in the literature (namely, omitted variables, reverse causality, and dynamic endogeneity). Using a sample of firms from the S&P 500 between 2004 and 2015, we find that WOCB have a positive and significant effect (at the 5% level) on CSP. We compare our results to more traditional approaches (pooled OLS, the fixed-effects model, and system GMM). We shed light on an issue that is still considered controversial (Byron and Post, 2016).