1. An introduction and background to the above-mentioned issue. (Maximum 500 words)
2. A literature review on female board participation (at least 4 published academic refereed articles) and directors’/ executive compensation (at least 4 published academic refereed articles). Your literature review can focus on academic research around the word. The first part of the literature review should focus on female board participation on corporate boards and impacts on different corporate aspects (performance, stock price, etc.). The second part of literature review should concentrate on director/ executive compensation and impacts on different corporate aspects such as performance, stock price, financial reporting quality etc. Your literature review should provide evidence that you have carefully examined the academic refereed articles (altogether at least 4 + 4 = 8 articles), understand them, and have been able to summarize the essential content by integrating them into your own arguments and perspective. (Maximum 800 words)
3. Development of hypotheses. You have to provide logical/ theoretical reasoning to develop your hypothesis. The hypothesis could be developed along the lines of examining the relationship between a particular type of remuneration (such as salary, bonus, stock option etc.) of female directors and financial reporting quality or examining the relationship between total remuneration package of female directors and financial reporting quality. (Maximum 800 words)
4. Research methods/ design, including (Maximum 700)
a. sources of information to be used to gather relevant data
b. sampling techniques
c. definition of variables to be used in the models
d. models to be used to examine the hypothesis/ hypotheses
5. Conclusions emphasising potential implications (Maximum 200 words) 6. Reference
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