Morten Bennedsen

We examine the effect of pay transparency on gender pay gap and firm outcomes. This paper exploits a 2006 legislation change in Denmark that requires firms to provide gender disaggregated wage statistics. Using detailed employee-employer administrative data and a difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we find the law reduces the gender pay gap, primarily by slowing the wage growth for male employees. The gender pay gap declines by approximately two percentage points, or a 13% reduction relative to the pre-legislation mean. Despite the reduction of the overall wage bill, the wage-transparency mandate does not affect firm profitability, likely because of the offsetting effect of reduced firm productivity.

This paper uses a unique dataset from Denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance. We focus on the decision to appoint either a family or external chief executive officer (CEO). The paper uses variation in CEO succession decisions that result from the gender of a departing CEO%u2019s firstborn child. This is a plausible instrumental variable (IV), as male first-child firms are more likely to pass on control to a family CEO than are female first-child firms, but the gender of the first child is unlikely to affect firms%u2019 outcomes. We find that family successions have a large negative causal impact on firm performance: operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentag...

Published: Bennedsen, Morten, Kasper Meisner Nielsen, Francisco Pérez-González, and Daniel Wolfenzon. "Inside the Family Firm: the Role of Families in Succession Decisions and Performance." Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, 2 (2007): 647-691.