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66 March/April 2014 BizEd research Vi i leVe nt/th i n kstock; tkAcch u k/th i n kstock Women's corporate board participation in Singapore is slowly but steadily increasing, according to the 2013 Singapore Board Diversity Report from the National University of Sin- gapore's Centre for Governance, Institutions and Organisations (CGIO). In 2012, women com- prised 7.9 percent of all board members for firms listed on the Singapore Exchange, up from 7.3 percent in 2011 and 6.9 per- cent in 2010. However, Singapore still ranked behind other countries in the region, including Indo- nesia, where 11.6 percent of board members were women; Hong Kong, where 9.4 percent were women; New Zealand, 9.1 percent; China, 9 percent; and Malaysia, 8.7 percent. Six in ten Singaporean boards were still all- male. The countries with worse representation included India (5.8 percent), South Korea (2.4 percent), and Japan (2.0 percent). The report also found that the presence of one woman on the board improved a compa- ny's return on equity and return on assets by small but statisti- cally significant amounts (.33 percent and .32 percent, respec- tively). Companies with women board members also scored higher in corporate governance. The report's authors include Marleen Dieleman, Meijun Qian, and Muhammad Ibra- him. The report is available at http://bschool.nus.edu/Portals/ 0/images/CGIO/Report/ Singapore% 20Board%20_ Diversity_Report_%202013_ Final.pdf. Countries in the CGIO study where women have the greatest representation on corporate boards: 49.9% norway 27% sweden 17.3% United Kingdom 16.6% United states 26.8% Finland 17% european Union 15.8% australia bUsinesses headqUartered in religious communities behave better than those that aren't, whether or not their leaders are reli- gious. This is the finding of a study by Jeffrey Callen of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management in Canada and Xiao- hua Fang of Georgia State University's Rob- inson College of Business in Atlanta. The researchers analyzed data from the American Religion Data Archive, looking at the number of churches and rate of church membership in U.S. counties. They then looked at the number of account restate- ments and stock returns for U.S. companies. They found that companies headquartered in the most religious counties were less likely to conceal bad news—and, so, are also less likely to experience the stock price crashes that often follow the market's sudden discovery of bad behavior. Callen notes that companies can pay a high cost if they're not upfront in a church-going com- munity. "Where you have strong corporate governance, religion doesn't need to kick in," says Callen. "But where there is poor corporate governance, religion substitutes for it." "Religion and Stock Price Crash Risk" is forthcoming in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. A working draft is available at ssrn.com/abstract=2001010. The paper reinforces a similar 2010 study by researchers Thomas Omer, Sean McGuire, and Nathan Sharp of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University in College Station. (See "Religion Curtails Financial Fraud" on page 61 of the September/October 2010 issue of BizEd.) Religious neighbors spark Good Behavior Xiaohua Fang Jeffrey callen Singapore's Gender Diversity Inches Up