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Abstract

In lending, diversity in company’s leadership could increase credit access to minority and women borrowers. We estimate diversity among governing board of directors (BOD) and senior management (SM) at a major US agricultural lending institution and investigate its linkages to minority farmers and women farmers. Main objectives: 1) measure the level of diversity among the leadership; 2) identify correlations between lender diversity leadership levels and minority farmers. Data is collected from Farm Credit (FC) Intuitions’ websites. Diversity is measured using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) and correlation tests are performed. Results show that females make up ~27% among SM and ~13.8% among BOD. White individuals dominate in BOD and SM. HHI for gender ranges between 0.67 for SM and 0.76 for BOD, while that for race is 0.96 for SM and 0.97 for BOD. As the percentage of minority and female farmers increases the BOD becomes more diverse (a negative correlation is observed). Correlation results indicate that the demographic composition of the BOD and SM is associated with that of the farmers in the county where the farm credit is located.

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