Recent post-SOX studies have consistently found that the presence of audit committee (AC) directors with multiple directorships is associated with lower financial reporting quality. An implicit assumption of these studies is that AC directors distribute their effort equally across all their...

Section 301 of SOX implicitly assumes that audit committees can independently determine audit fees. Critics of Section 301 have questioned this assumption, in particular, and the efficacy of Section 301, more generally. In response, the SEC issued a concept release in 2015 calling for public...