مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تاثیر اعضای کمیته حسابرسی و سبک آنها بر انتخاب گزارشگری مالی – Sage 2018

The question of what influences a firm’s financial reporting practice has been examined extensively in the accounting literature (Dechow, Ge, & Schrand, 2010). Prior studies approach this question by identifying factors at the market level (Leuz, Nanda, & Wysocki, 2003), the firm level (Klein, 2002; Lang, Raedy, & Wilson, 2006), and more recently the individual manager level (Ge, Matsumoto, & Zhang, 2011). However, the papers that study the influence of individuals on corporate financial reporting decisions focus on corporate executives, mostly CEOs and CFOs.1 This article investigates the impact on corporate financial reporting choices of a different group of individuals: audit committee members. Specifically, this article examines whether financial reporting decisions are affected by differences in individual characteristics among audit committee members that are generated from various factors such as personality, ethical beliefs, and personal experiences that are not directly observable. Audit committees of public firms play the role of ‘‘overseeing the accounting and financial reporting processes of the issuer and audits of the financial statements of the issuer.’’2 Such a role involves ‘‘reviewing and discussing with management, internal and outside auditors the annual audited financial statements . . . and quarterly financial statements’’ (Braiotta, 2004). Hence, the financial statements of a firm are the end product of a reporting process which involves both management and the audit committee. The audit committee sometimes makes substantial adjustments to the financial statements during this process, by resolving the dispute between outside auditors and management, gathering information from internal auditors, and/or overseeing management’s compliance with financial reporting standards and regulation (Caskey, Nagar, & Petacchi, 2010). Prior literature has identified various audit committee characteristics that are associated with financial reporting quality, such as independence (Klein, 2002), expertise (Be´dard, Chtourou, & Courteau, 2004), and busyness (Tanyi & Smith, 2014). A common feature of these studies is that they rely on observable characteristics of the audit committee: For example, the expertise of audit committee members is usually captured by their professional qualifications (e.g., Certified Public Accountant [CPA] or Certified Financial Analyst), and independence is measured by whether the member is a current or former employee, is a family member of an executive officer, or receives compensation from the firm other than for being a board member (Klein, 2002). These observable characteristics, while meaningful, may not capture the full picture of how audit committee members can influence their firms’ financial reporting. In particular, psychology studies find that an individual’s job performance and career outcomes are affected by numerous factors, such as personality traits (e.g., Hurtz & Donovan, 2000), self-perception (Judge, Erez, & Bono, 1998), ethical beliefs (H. Koh & Boo, 2001), and childhood experience (Blustein, Walbridge, Friedlander, & Palladino, 1991), to name but a few. These factors are often not directly observable but are likely to affect the effectiveness of monitoring by audit committee members, and thus in turn influence firms’ financial reporting practices. The goal of this study was to examine the overall effect of audit committee members on financial reporting that arise from these unobservable characteristics. Following prior literature, I label these characteristics as ‘‘styles’’ of audit committee members (Bertrand & Schoar, 2003).