We examine the associations between the cost of equity capital and two audit committee characteristics: 1) average audit committee members' age; and 2) average number of audit committee members' other directorships. The study is motivated by the recent emphasis on the important role of audit...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is enacted to strengthen corporate governance practices by enhancing the power of audit committee. After 2002, audit committee has received increasing emphasis in accounting research. The objective of this study is to review the growing volume of audit committee...

The role of the audit committee and the internal audit function in corporate governance has grown in recent years. In that context, the audit literature and practice has underlined the increasingly important role of support and interaction between the audit committee and the internal audit with...

Recent trends in corporate board composition indicate an increase in the appointment of directors with legal expertise. Using two financial reporting quality measures, accruals quality and discretionary accruals, we find – for a sample of Russell 1000 firms in 2003 and 2005 – that the...

Health care reform and health system financing required to meet population needs and current financial constraints proved to be a major challenge worldwide. In these conditions the role of Public Internal Audit Committee in the public system is extremely important. It is known that the...

By employing a Heckman two-stage selection model, we identify whether employing a financial expert with or without accounting expertise on the audit committee is optimal and how earnings quality varies across these optimal and suboptimal choices. Using four earnings quality measures...