Rahmawati Rahmawati

This study uses human capital that shows the intangible asset’s core in reducing the risk or improving firm performance to solve previous inconsistent results of women’s role in firm performance. Thus, this paper examines the role of human capital as the mediator in the influence of gender diversity on credit risk in a rural bank. This examination involves 433 rural banks based on the purposive sampling method. The result reveals that higher gender diversity has higher human capital (α = 0.135, ρ = 0.005) and higher human capital has lower credit risk (α = –0.205, ρ = 0.000). It also revealed that when gender diversity is controlled by human capital as a mediator on credit risk, gender diversity does not affect credit risk (α = –0.022, ρ = 0.625). However, human capital still affects credit risk (α = –0.205, ρ = 0.000). It implies that the higher a woman on the board of directors, the lower the credit risk through her education competence. Women as organization leaders have high self-appreciation from organization members in implementing their strategies and supervising them. High credit risk in rural banks needs appropriate management as a part of an internal governance mechanism. This study contributes to gender diversity literature through the ability to manage risk in measuring women’s role as strategic agents. This study also contributes to investor protection through the reputation of women on boards as monitoring agents.

Local government competitiveness is an intriguing contemporary issue that has not been discussed extensively in prior studies on the evolution of the structure and scope of government. This study aims to explore how local government management processes can enhance regional competitiveness for the benefit of citizens. Using an analytical hierarchy of paired comparisons and indicator aggregation, this study analyzes several components of the local government managerial process by quantifying the degree of importance of each component. Data were collected from 38 regions in Indonesia and 34 government experts. The results of the analysis show that there are three components of the local government managerial process that contribute significantly to regional competitiveness: the quality of customer/citizen management with an eigenvector value of 0.187, strategic planning with an eigenvector value of 0.169, and the effectiveness of the integrity system with an eigenvector value of 0.136. Other results show that the resultant eigenvector values for other components are less than 0.100 or 10%, so these components are not classified as strong. Furthermore, the p-value of the intercoder reliability test using the t-test was greater than the significance level of 0.05, implying that there was no difference between the test results of the first and second expert groups. This study concludes that customer/citizen satisfaction with government products and services, the effectiveness of strategic planning that focuses on socio-economic development, and legal and ethical compliance of organizational actors are the primary determinants of enhancing regional competitiveness.