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Prior work has shown that the board of directors can alleviate market imperfections that lead to capital investment inefficiency. The authors extend previous work by exploring how board characteristics influence the efficiency of human capital investment, a critical production factor that has remained insufficiently examined. Specifically, this study aims to investigate how board activity, size, the presence of a separate chairman, female directors and board independence affect firm labour investment efficiency in the European context.

The sample contains 4,331 firm-year observations traded on the STOXX® Europe 600 index from 2009 through 2022. This paper applies a lagged ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to test the proposed hypotheses. It also uses a dynamic panel generalised method of moments (GMM) regression to tackle potential endogeneity concerns.

The results show that board gender diversity and the level of independent directors are positively linked to labour investment efficiency, whereas board size and meeting frequency are negatively related to labour investment efficiency. Meanwhile, the presence of a separate chairman on the board does not appear to be significantly associated with labour investment efficiency. In additional subgroup analyses, the authors find that board gender diversity mitigates managers’ inclinations towards both overinvestment and underinvestment in labour. The authors also find that the level of independent directors helps greatly in reducing the underinvestment in labour, while it fails to attenuate the overinvestment in labour. Moreover, the authors find board size to be significantly associated with the tendency to make suboptimal labour decisions, manifesting as both overinvestment and underinvestment in labour. Finally, the results show that board meetings are significantly associated with overinvestment problems, while underinvestment problems seem to be unrelated to meeting frequency.

The empirical results have implications for policymakers and market participants in Europe. Firstly, firms may improve the efficiency of their labour investments by increasing directors’ independence and adding more female voices to corporate boards. Secondly, the evidence shows that some board attributes, such as board activity and size, do not necessarily have a beneficial impact on corporate decisions, particularly labour investment decisions. Finally, market participants are likely to benefit from this paper by understanding the role of board attributes in promoting the efficient allocation of firm resources.

This paper makes two significant contributions. Firstly, it extends the literature on the role of boards of directors in shaping corporate decision-making processes, particularly concerning human capital investment decisions within European firms. By doing so, the authors provide new evidence confirming that certain board attributes, such as board size, director independence and board gender diversity, are important for optimising firms’ resource allocation. Secondly, although numerous studies investigate boards’ role in capital investment decisions, relatively few empirical studies exist on the role of boards in labour investment decisions. This paper, therefore, tries to tackle this void in the literature by investigating firms’ decision-making concerning labour investments.

This retrospective narrative inquiry explored an undergraduate student’s lived experience in negotiating her identity as an engaged reader of English as a foreign language.

Narrative inquiry was employed to gain a deeper and better understanding of the participant’s engagement in reading courses. Olif (pseudonym, female) was recruited due to her significant learning achievements and willingness to share her experiences. To collect the data, we conducted several online interviews with her. To triangulate our findings, we also asked her to share her learning artifacts from the reading courses.

The thematic analysis revealed two major findings. First, her reading engagement is driven by both personal and academic motivation. Furthermore, her involvement in collaborative reading tasks fosters a deeper comprehension of texts and enhances creativity.

The study has two major limitations. First, it interviewed only one student and was conducted over a relatively short period. Second, it examined the participant’s experience across three different reading courses, which potentially lacks deeper insights into how each course uniquely contributes to learning engagement.

The study concludes that promoting personalized and collaborative reading tasks enables undergraduate students to develop their identity as engaged readers. Despite focusing on a single participant, this study offers a unique perspective on how the participant’s voice can potentially impact teachers’ pedagogical design in reading classrooms.