We provide the first, large sample evidence on firms’ voluntary, third-party verification of environmental and social metrics in ESG reports (“ESG assurance”) in the United States. Focusing on S&P 500 firms from 2010-2020, we document a striking increase in ESG assurance. Unlike financial...

I examine whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US is a learning organization (i.e., one that is capable of learning and adaptation to the dynamic nature of the securities markets – the subject of the SEC's regulatory oversight). Using the treatment of public corporate...

The debate about the compensation of executives and directors is a discussion about incentives and agency costs. This article analyzes basic tools to reduce agency costs and also assesses the ongoing debate about the future regulation of the compensation of executives and directors. It draws...

Motivated primarily by the claims that audit committee independence and accounting expertise and CEO compensation influence audit fees, this study examines the effect of such factors, on audit fees in two different institutional settings in the post-Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) era. The...

This study focuses on U.S. shareholder derivative cases in which Audit Committee members were defendants. Three grounds for Audit Committee liability were alleged in those cases: (1) violation of the Fiduciary Duties of Care, Loyalty or Good Faith, which may include failure to provide proper...

The purpose of this quantitative, correlational research was to examine to what extent the personnel factors of internal auditing departments predict the control environment within the public sector. Using the 2013 COSO Internal Control-Integrated Framework as the theoretical framework, we...

This study analyzes the effect that banks' investments in corporate social responsibility (CSR) have on bank performance. I find that banks' investments in CSR have a positive impact on financial performance, measured in terms of both accounting performance and stock market value. However, not...

This study examines how globalization of corporate governance practices influence the risk of European CEOs being dismissed. We argue that the harsh monitoring of the American corporate governance system spills over to the rest of the world as a result of this globalization. We focus on direct...

The popular and academic literatures report that women, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are under-represented on US corporate boards of directors, relative to their incidence in the US labor force. We confirm this observation by tabulating the presence of female and under-represented...

We report our findings on cross-societal variations in values about CSR in senior executives from five economies. We find that executives in all five are concerned with the roles of their firms in society, with those in Japan most so and those in Hong Kong least so. However, executives in each...