Angelica Gonzalez

Angelica Gonzalez is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at The University of Edinburgh. Angelica’s research focuses on corporate finance and corporate governance, with a strong emphasis on the gender diversity on boards. Some of Angelica’s work on gender diversity; e.g. Women on Board: Does Boardroom Gender Diversity Affect Firm Risk? , has been widely cited and covered by the media; e.g.CFA Digest, LSE Business Review, Board Agenda. Angelica sits on the CFA Institute Working Group that is developing the UK’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Code for the financial investment industry. Signatories from the industry will use the Code to improve their recruitment, promotion and retention practices. Angelica enjoys interacting with practitioners and has presented some of her research findings to the finance community in the city of Edinburgh, e.g she gave a talk on “Women in the Boardroom: Do glass ceilings really cap performance?” at Aberdeen Standard.

Her current projects include:

Is Sustainable Investing Driven by Altruism? : Evidence from Shocks to Philanthropy (with Boutchkova, M. and S. Zhang). We test the conjecture that sustainable investing (SI) is driven by altruistic motives by examining the responses of charitable giving and SI flows to exogenous shocks to altruism. We find that while philanthropy responds strongly and significantly, SI flows do not. In addition, two further types of shocks to the reputation and tax shield benefits of  philanthropy do not result in an increase in SI either. Our results contribute to understanding the channels behind SI and suggest that altruism is not as an important determinant as previously suggested. Do Local Gender Attitudes Affect Women’s Representation on Corporate Boards? (with L. Xing and V. Sila) Women are underrepresented on corporate boards. By employing the large variation in socioeconomic development across provinces in China, we show that societal gender attitudes, rather than supply related factors, are obstacles to boardrooms. Boards tend to be more gender-diverse in a province (1) where there is a smaller gender gap in students’ enrolment into the top-ranked STEM university, (2) where there is a stronger belief that women and men have equal innate abilities, equal opportunities in employment and career development, and equal housework loads; and (3) where there are female political leaders in the local government

Her recent outputs include:

Internal Capital Markets and Predictability in Complex Ownership Firms (with Sarkissian S., Tun J. and R. Chang) Journal of Corporate Finance, forthcoming. Test Power Properties of Within-Firm Estimators of Ownership and Board-Related Explanatory Variables with Low Time Variation (with Boutchkova M. and D. Cueto) Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, forthcoming. Does Cooperation Among Women Enhance or Impede Firm Performance? (with V. Sila and L. Xing; Lead Article) British Accounting Review, 53(4): 1-20, 2021 Gender Diversity and the Spillover Effects of Women on Boards (with Boutchkova M., Main B., and V. Sila; CGIR Editor’s Pick/ Lead Article) Corporate Governance an International Review, 29 (1), 2020 Director Reputation Incentives and Stock Price Informativeness (with Sila, V. and J. Hagendorff) Journal of Corporate Finance, 47, 2017