Diversity Investing

Abstract

Top management team diversity matters for stock returns. We develop a new text–based measure of team diversity and apply it to a sample of over 40,000 top executives in U.S. firms from 2001 to 2014. Buying firms with diverse teams and selling firms with homogenous teams — a strategy we call “diversity investing” — outperforms leading asset pricing anomalies over our sample period on a value-weighted basis. We examine a range of possible explanations and find strong evidence for the view that analysts and investors have downward-biased return expectations on firms with diverse teams, consistent with a mispricing explanation for diversity returns.

Keywords: Behavioral Finance, Top Management Teams, Anomalies, Diversity