Edinburgh Napier University

  In this paper, we examine the impact of board demographic characteristics on Chinese firms’ cross-border Mergers and Acquisition (M&A) performance, especially the gender diversity of the board composition. We unveil that female board proportion exhibits a positive and significant effect on cross-border M&A performance. On the other hand, board member age diversity and board member education diversity play a trivial role on cross-border M&A performance. We further introduce an optimization model called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which is an artificial intelligence technical application, to address the optimal board diversity regarding the M&A performance. We demonstrate that a better organized board structure, such as increasing female board presentation tend to improve cross-border M&A performance of Chinese firms. We argue that the enhanced performance from optimized board diversity might be transmitted through the channel of corporate governance. Furthermore, we reveal that the board diversity effect is stronger in private owned companies compared with state owned companies. Our results can thereby deliver implications of corporate governance.