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Full-Text Articles in Business

Economic Effects Of Sox Section 404 Compliance: A Corporate Insider Perspective, Cindy Alexander, Scott Bauguess, Gennaro Bernile, Alex Lee, Jennifer Marietta-Westberg Dec 2013

Economic Effects Of Sox Section 404 Compliance: A Corporate Insider Perspective, Cindy Alexander, Scott Bauguess, Gennaro Bernile, Alex Lee, Jennifer Marietta-Westberg

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We use survey responses from 2,901 corporate insiders to assess the costs and benefits of compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The majority of respondents recognize compliance benefits, but they do not perceive these benefits to outweigh the costs, on average. This is particularly true among smaller companies where the start-up costs are proportionately larger. However, the perceived efficiency of compliance increases with auditor attestations, years of compliance experience, and after the remediation of a material weakness. Notably, the perceived effects of compliance depend largely on firm complexity, but are mostly unrelated to firm governance structure.


Can A Code Of Ethics Improve Manager Behavior And Investor Confidence? An Experimental Study, Bruce I. Davidson, Douglas E. Stevens Jan 2013

Can A Code Of Ethics Improve Manager Behavior And Investor Confidence? An Experimental Study, Bruce I. Davidson, Douglas E. Stevens

Accountancy Faculty Publications

Policy makers and corporations have recently emphasized a code of ethics as an effective aspect of corporate governance. The corporate governance literature in accounting, however, provides little empirical or theoretical support for this emphasis. We address this gap between public policy and the literature by studying the effectiveness of a code of ethics in an experimental setting. Using Bicchieri's (2006) model of social norm activation, we predict that a code of ethics will improve manager return behavior and investor confidence to the extent that it activates social norms that control opportunistic behavior. Further, we predict that adding a certification choice …