Mark

Introduction#

Your introduction is very straight to the point. I’d argue you would have to make clear the relevance of the subject first. Why does CEO turnover matter? Does it matter for the firm? For the shareholders? And why? Is it a corporate governance mechanism?

While studies have been done on the impact of board composition on CEO turnover (Guest, 2019; Goyal & Park, 2002; Laux, 2008), the studies taking diversity into account remain somewhat lackluster when it comes to diversity.

This sentence is not very clear: why are studies that take diversity into account limited in their scope? This is very important, as it is the justification of your research.

Also try to sketch out the mechanisms at work: why would diversity matter? Why is the 15% threshold so important?

A logit regression will be used to test the hypothesis, in which forced turnover is the dependent variable, and excess stock returns, as defined by CAPM, and board composition characteristics will be used as independent variables. On top of that, a set of control variables will be used. Following, a firm and year fixed effect will be added to the regression to account for corporate culture as well as to account for differences in time.

This is already very precise. Maybe save these details for the methods section, and use the introduction to elaborate more on the theoretical framework. For example, you might think that firing a CEO of a certain ethnicity or gender might be more costlier than firing a CEO of another ethnicity/gender. Try to spell out reasons why that might be the case. In addition to these rational (meaning: costs and benefits) reasons, what other reasons might there be, and might they be dependent on certain biases?

Literature#

The structure of the lit. review is a little bit confusing. First, you are focusing on the influence of firm performance on CEO turnover. Then, you are focusing on determinants of firm performance, and on the effectiveness of the board of directors. Why?

Section 2.3 and 2.4 should be longer, and focus more explicitly on the role of gender and ethnicity in CEO turnover, because that is your dependent variable. Try to focus on the costs and the benefits first, and then on various other (‘non-economic’ theories).

Hypotheses#

It is good that you already thought of this, but:

Adam and Ferreira (2009) argue that the interaction effect between stock performance and the percentage of women of the board is significant

I suppose they just find this, they don’t argue this. To argue is to give a reason. You should make clear in your justification what is the reason!

However, the most important issue right now seems to be the lack of available literature regarding the topic.

This is never a good argument for a hypothesis. Try to argue explicitly from the theory.

Finally, make sure to distinguish well between hypotheses, which is about concepts, and operationalizations of these hypotheses, which use explicit variable definitions.