Variable description and measurement

In this section, I will describe the measurement of my dependent variables, independent variables and control variables. I will also explain the rationale behind the control variables I choose for analysis.

3.3.1 Dependent Variables

Corporate Equality Index (CEI) Score. Firms’ LGBT-friendly HR policies are measured by the CEI score published annually by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

CEI score has a range of -25 to 100.

Firm Performance. I use both market-based performance measure (Tobin’s Q) and accounting-based performance measure (ROA) as my outcome variables for firm financial performance. Tobin’s Q is the ratio of the market value of total assets to the book value of total assets. The market value of total assets equals to the book value of

total assets plus the market value of equity minus the sum of the book value of equity plus deferred taxes and investment tax credit. I use a log transformation of Tobin’s Q in my regression analysis. ROA is the ratio of operating income after depreciation to the book value of total assets.

3.3.2 Independent Variables

Foreign-born CEO. According to the definition of Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the term “immigrant” or “foreign-born” refers to “people residing in the United States who were not U.S. citizens at birth”. This is a binary variable that is equal to 1 if the CEO is foreign born, and 0 otherwise. Foreign-born CEOs in my sample consist of those whose birthplaces were not the United States and then migrated to the United States and those whose nationalities are not America.

Female CEO. This is a binary variable that is equal to 1 if the CEO is a woman, and 0 if the CEO is a man.

Internationalization. I use a single-item indicator to measure the degree of firm’s focus on foreign sales. Internationalization is calculated as the ratio of foreign sales to total sales. This item has a theoretical range of 0 to 1.

Mimic. Adoption by similar others is proxied by the term “mimic” in this thesis. This item is the same one used by Everly & Schwarz (2015). Mimic is used to capture whether one firm mimics the benchmark in the same industry. For each firm in an industry, mimic is coded as 0 in any year if no firm in that industry has got a perfect score on the CEI. If there is any firm scored 100 on the CEI in a given year, then the mimic variable is coded as 1 since the year when a firm has earned a perfect score on the CEI and remains there.

3.3.3 Control Variables

To isolate the effect of the experience of foreign-born CEOs/female CEOs on LGBT-friendly HR policies, I include both individual and firm level variables that might co-vary with a CEO’s inclination to adopt LGBT-friendly HR policies. On individual level, I control for CEO age, tenure, and duality. On firm level, I control for firm size, firm’s leverage and financial health. The rationale for controlling CEO age is that younger people may be more open-minded towards sexual orientation and identity as the shift of social attitudes towards LGBT people (Ciszek & Gallicano, 2013). Given that lower turnover among executives could lead to organizational rigidity and resistant to new policies (Pfeffer, 1983), I control for CEO tenure. Duality is an important dimension of CEO power (Frinkelstein & D’ Aveni, 1994). For instance, CEOs who are also the chairman of their board directors have the power to decide who is one their boards (Hambrick, 2007), therefore, CEOs who are also the chairman of the boards could have more managerial discretion to promote relatively controversial policies such as LGBT-friendly HR policies. Additionally, in the study of the impact of minority leaders (e.g.

women leaders and racial/ethnic leaders) on organizational diversity policy, duality has been included as a control variable (Cook & Glass, 2015, 2016, 2018). On firm level, I control for firm size because larger firms may have more effective human resource departments and they are also more likely to be the targets of social activists (Briscoe, Chin & Hambrick, 2014), therefore larger firms may care more about their public image and cater for the society’s expectations. Given that there are concerns that LGBT-friendly HR policies may consume company’s resources and impede firm’s bottom line, the reasons to control firm leverage and firm financial health is similar as firms with lower leverage and healthier financial state may have more slack resources to advance LGBT-friendly HR polices. Following prior literature similar to my topics, such as Cook & Glass (2015), I use ROA to measure firm’s financial health.

When studying the impact of foreign-born CEOs/female CEOs on firm financial performance (ROA and Tobin’s Q), I control for firm size, CEO tenure and CEO age.

Size of firm are commonly used as a control in an analysis of leadership and financial performance (e.g. Benmelech & Frydman, 2015; Carter et al., 2010). However, it’s difficult to predict the direction of the impact of firm size on firm performance. For instance, Dezso and Ross (2012) found a negative relationship between firm size and Tobin’s Q. According to another study by Beck and his colleagues (2005), smaller firms’

growth opportunities (measured as firm’s sales growth over the past three years) are reported to be more likely to be constrained because smaller firms are more likely to face obstacles such as difficulty in obtaining finance. But firm size is important to control for in the analysis of financial performance. In addition to firm size, CEO age should also be one of my control variables as CEO age is reported to be associated with CEO’s risk-taking behaviors and managerial style, for example, older generations of CEOs tend to be more conservative in their decision-making. (Betrand & Schoar, 2003).

CEO tenure is controlled given that it is positively related with top managers’ risk-taking propensity (Simsek, 2007), which could further impact organizational performance. Control variables in this study are measured as follows.

Firm size. I operationalize firm size by using the natural logarithmic form of total assets plus one when I study the relationship between foreign-born CEOs/female CEOs and corporate equality index. Firm size is proxied as total number of employees when I study the impact of foreign-born/female CEOs on firms’ ROA and Tobin’s Q.

Leverage. Leverage is calculated as the ratio of debt in current liabilities and long-term debt to total assets.

Financial health. I use ROA as a measure of firm’s financial health, which is calculated as the ratio of operating income after depreciation to the book value of total assets. This is added only as the controls to test hypothesis 1a and hypothesis 1b.

CEO age. The difference between year t minus the calendar year when a CEO was born.

CEO tenure. This is measured by years in the data set. Those CEOs who were appointed in the end of year were viewed as being new CEOs in the following year in my sample.

Duality. I code 1 for those CEOs who also served as the chairman of the board, and 0 otherwise. I match the name of CEOs with their annual title (“chairman”, “chairman of the board”, “chairman of the executive committee”) in the ExecuComp database.

Industry. I use the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code of each firm. I then create dummies for each industry that are included in the regression.

There are 19 industry dummies in my sample.