Jianrong Wang, Bo Wang, and Wokun Zhou Applied Economics (forthcoming)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2026.2687734

What the paper is about

A firm’s stock price is supposed to reflect its fundamentals, but that reflection depends on someone inside the firm translating raw information into a form the market can use. In most countries this translation job is scattered across several officers, the CFO, investor relations, legal counsel, which makes it hard to pin disclosure quality on any one individual. Chinese listed firms are different. Regulation requires every firm to appoint a single board secretary who holds sole, legally defined responsibility for disclosure, investor communication, and the release of firm announcements. That concentrated mandate gives us a cleaner setting to ask whether the person holding this role, and specifically their gender, is associated with how much firm-specific information gets into stock prices.

Using Chinese A-share firms from 2010 to 2022, we find that firms with a female board secretary have significantly higher stock price informativeness (SPI) than firms with a male board secretary. Because the appointment of a female secretary is unlikely to be random, we lean on a sample of within-firm transitions, cases where a firm’s secretary changes from male to female or from female to male, and estimate a staggered difference-in-differences model that avoids using already-treated firms as controls for newly treated ones. SPI rises in the year following a male-to-female transition, and the increase does not appear when the transition runs in reverse. That asymmetry is what we lean on for a causal reading of the result, and the pattern holds up under propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and a Heckman correction built around the local supply of female secretaries in a firm’s industry and province.

We also look at where the association seems to run through. Analyst forecasts become more dispersed once a female secretary takes over, which we read alongside the SPI increase as more consistent with analysts absorbing richer, more granular disclosure than with added confusion. The relation between the secretary’s gender and SPI is also concentrated among firms with weaker external monitoring, lower institutional ownership or lower governance scores, and is largest in high-tech firms and other settings where the pre-existing information environment is relatively opaque. We treat these patterns as suggestive of where a female secretary’s presence matters most rather than as a fully identified mechanism, since the paper does not isolate communication style or risk preference directly.

Highlights

  • Female board secretaries are associated with higher stock price informativeness.
  • A difference-in-differences design around secretary transitions supports a causal reading.
  • The effect coincides with greater analyst forecast dispersion.
  • The association is concentrated in firms with weaker external monitoring or governance.
  • The effect is largest in high-tech industries and other opaque disclosure environments.