Business Commons^™

Audit Committee Characteristics And Firm Performance During The Global Financial Crisis, Husam Aldamen, Keith Duncan, Simone Kelly, Ray Mcnamara, Stephan Nagel

Keith Duncan

We address the question ‘do governance enhancing audit committee (AC) characteristics mitigate the firm performance impact of significant-adverse-economic events such as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC)?’ Our analysis reveals that smaller audit committees with more experience and financial expertise are more likely to be associated with positive firm performance in the market. We also find that longer serving chairs of audit committees negatively impacts accounting performance. However, accounting performance is positively impacted where ACs include blockholder representation, the chair of the board, whose members have more external directorships and whose chair has more years of managerial experience. We contribute to …

Determinants Of Voluntary Board Remuneration Committee Formation And Composition, Pamela Kent, Kim Kercher, James Routledge

Pamela Kent

This study provides evidence on factors that determine the voluntary adoption of corporate governance recommendations regarding remuneration committees in 2008. The findings indicate that remuneration committee existence is significantly associated with insider share ownership, institutional shareholding and change in CEO. Composition of the committee is significantly explained by independent directors and complexity measured by geographical segments (marginally). Other variables controlled for are growth opportunities, free cash flow, asset turnover, size, governance quality, debt levels, age and the presence of a big four auditor.

Does Adopting Good Corporate Governance Enhance Accruals Quality During The Global Financial Crisis?, Husam Aldamen, Keith Duncan

Keith Duncan

This paper examines the impact of corporate governance practices on accruals quality during the global financial crisis (GFC). Prior research establishes linkages between good governance and accruals quality during periods of financial stability (Strydom 2008; Kent et al. 2010; Dhaliwal et al. 2010). We extend this analysis to the 2008-2009 GFC period to assess whether the monitoring and informational benefits of corporate governance mitigate the negative effects of the exogenous shock, thereby increasing accruals quality. Our findings show that good corporate governance practices increases accruals quality during the GFC. Furthermore, governance is shown to positively impact innate accruals quality and, …

Governance-Default Risk Relationship And The Demand For Intermediated And Non-Intermediated Debt, Husam Aldamen, Keith Duncan, Safdar Khan

Keith Duncan

This paper explores the impact of corporate governance on the demand for intermediated debt (asset finance, bank debt, non-bank private debt) and non-intermediated debt (public debt) in the Australian debt market. Relative to other countries the Australian debt market is characterised by higher proportions of intermediatedor private debt with a lower inherent level of information asymmetry in that private lenders have greater access to financial information (Gray, Koh & Tong 2009). Our firm level, cross-sectional evidence suggests that higher corporate governance impacts demand for debt via the mitigation of default risk. However, this relationship is not uniform across all debt …

Corporate Governance And Access To Interest Bearing Debt, Husam Aldamen, Keith Duncan

Keith Duncan

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to extend the growing body of literature on the impact of corporate governance on debt contracting by examining if better governance is associated with access to interest bearing debt. The paper aims to explore whether no-debt companies have governance structures that are qualitatively different to debt companies within a market with a distinct corporate finance structure, such as Australia.

Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is portioned into two stages. The first stage focuses on univariate analysis which includes descriptive statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The second stage introduces multivariate analysis, in the …