Going concern or liquidation legal procedure when women sit on the governing body? Primary evidence from the Italian scenario

This research aims to investigate whether the presence of women in the governing body of companies in crisis is related to the type of legal procedure chosen, dividing the latter into “going concern” and “liquidation.” As the literature shows gender features that could impact the type of procedure, the study intends to empirically verify it. The research relies on an original dataset focused on a sample of Italian companies that have undergone a financial crisis, leading to their engagement in legal procedures such as bankruptcy and debt restructuring agreements. A logistic regression model is employed to assess the impact of gender, defined as the presence of female directors, on the legal procedure types. To the authors’ best knowledge, no previous research has investigated the corporate governance of companies in legal procedure, focusing on the gender variable and dividing the legal procedures into “going concern” and “liquidation.” Since the literature about the gender of corporate governance is not unanimous, the peculiar analysis proposed could add a piece to the puzzle that seems hard to compose, with interesting implications for policymakers, entrepreneurs, managers, and academics.