We investigate how age diversity on corporate boards affects their monitoring performance. Despite the critical importance of the monitoring function of the board, previous studies focus mainly on the advisory role of age-diversified boards. Our emphasis is on banks where the opacity in their complex operations poses a challenge for external stakeholders to assess performance and thus they heavily rely on the board for monitoring managerial activities. We examine how age diversity affects one of the primary monitoring roles of corporate boards – a responsibility over the provision of high-quality financial reports. Using a large panel data of banks in the United States (n=7 005) our findings suggest that age-diversified boards are associated with less earnings management, indicative of higher quality reporting. Our results still hold for different indicators of the monitoring performance of the board in other areas, such as loan risk. Further analysis reveals that, as age diversity increases, the strength of the board’s monitoring effectiveness also increases. Overall, our findings suggest that age-diversified boards are more effective at monitoring managerial decision-making.

我们调查了公司董事会的年龄多样性如何影响他们的监督绩效。尽管董事会的监督职能至关重要，但以前的研究主要集中在年龄多元化董事会的咨询作用上。我们的重点是银行，其复杂运营的不透明性给外部利益相关者评估绩效带来了挑战，因此他们严重依赖董事会来监控管理活动。我们研究了年龄多样性如何影响公司董事会的主要监督角色之一——提供高质量财务报告的责任。使用美国银行的大型面板数据（n = 7 005），我们的研究结果表明，年龄多元化的董事会与较少的盈余管理相关，表明报告质量较高。我们的结果仍然适用于董事会在其他领域的监控绩效的不同指标，例如贷款风险。进一步的分析表明，随着年龄多元化的增加，董事会监督有效性的强度也会增加。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，年龄多元化的董事会在监督管理决策方面更有效。