Ownership Power, Board Gender Diversity, and <scp>CSR</scp> Performance: Evidence From <scp>MENA</scp> Banks

ABSTRACT This study addresses two principal research objectives. First, it examines the effect of multiple large shareholders (MLS) on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) banking sector, under the dispersion and the coalition hypotheses. Second, it investigates whether board gender diversity (GD) moderates the MLS–CSR nexus. It uses a sample of banks across 12 MENA countries over the period 2010–2022 and implements the System Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) as the empirical estimation framework. Empirical findings indicate that under the dispersion hypothesis, the first largest shareholder does not promote CSR engagement in the MENA region, whereas the second and third largest shareholders exhibit positive and statistically significant associations with CSR performance enhancement. Under the coalition hypothesis, results demonstrate that the coalition between the first and second largest shareholders does not support CSR in the MENA region. Conversely, coalitions between the second and third largest shareholders and among all three largest shareholders are significantly and positively associated with an improvement of CSR performance. Furthermore, findings confirm that gender diversity moderates the MLS–CSR relationship under both theoretical frameworks.