Employee demographic diversity and firm performance

Abstract This article examines the relationship between employee demographic diversity and firm performance measured by future stock returns for a large sample of US public companies. We use novel demographic data extracted from employees' online profiles and resumes and focus on three key aspects of employee demographic diversity: age, gender, and ethnicity. We find no evidence supportive of an outperformance associated with greater employee‐diverse companies, neither using portfolio‐sorting approaches nor cross‐sectional and panel regressions. We also find no significant associations between employee demographic diversity and ROE, gross profit, and labor productivity.