This paper conducts a meta-analysis of 182 published archival accounting and auditing studies on the corporate governance determinants of financial restatements. We aim to provide a focused and systematic examination of various internal and external corporate governance factors that may predict financial restatements. We do so by aggregating results statistically across individual studies and correcting statistical artifacts, thereby we provide findings that are much more precise than those of narrative reviews. We categorize the chosen governance variables into (a) audit firm and audit engagement characteristics; (b) gender, board attributes, and audit committee attributes; (c) CEO related attributes; (d) ownership structure variables; and (e) external corporate governance variables, and thus we generate a total of 37 separate corporate governance variables. Our results reveal that the governance mechanisms of Big N auditor choice, types, and timeliness of audit opinions and board independence are significantly and negatively associated with the occurrence of financial restatements. However, economic bonding between auditors and their clients, insider ownership, and firm complexity all increase the likelihood of restatements significantly. We hope that our findings will make a meaningful contribution to the literature on financial restatements and corporate governance by providing insights for regulators on the governance mechanisms that may require further scrutiny in combating the occurrence of financial restatements.

We synthesize the empirical archival literature on the determinants of auditor choice in an international setting, critique the findings, and offer suggestions for future research. We categorize the determinants into (i) firm‐level ownership variables, (ii) nonownership corporate governance determinants, (iii) economic determinants driven by the risk of information asymmetry, and (iv) country‐level institutional determinants, including legal protection of investors, political connections, and national culture. Our comprehensive review not only enriches the academic literature, but also provides material of considerable interest to investors, practitioners (auditors), and regulators.

We focus on the attributes of audit committee members at an individual level through investigating their role‐based identity; this approach represents a departure from the traditional approach of measuring their independence and financial expertise. The data revealed that there is a wide range of backgrounds and attributes identified by New Zealand audit committee members as being helpful in performing their responsibilities. Members’ motivation and justification for serving on the audit committees played a significant role in verifying their identity salience in terms of being an audit committee member. Regulators and other corporate governance stakeholders may benefit from a further understanding of the reciprocal relationship between an audit committee mechanism and its members’ identity salience.

This paper explores how and why some small and medium size family businesses can survive in an environment that is full of uncertainties. We content that family businesses have an inherent resilience, constructed through its organisational identity that may render continuous competitive advantages and enable family businesses to meet the challenges and to take the opportunities embedded in turbulent conditions. Based on thirteen interviews of family businesses’ owners and managers, we found that the constitution of family business as an organisational identity denotes the strategic choices.

The surge in Peer to Peer e-commerce has increasingly been characterized by changing the online marketplace to a more personalized environment for the buyer and seller. This personalization involves revealing information on buyer reviews, pictures and biographical information on the sellers to reduce the perceived ``purchase risk or to facilitate trust with the buyers. However, this personalization has generated possibilities for discrimination in the online marketplace. In this paper, we examine the effect of host information available online (race, gender and sexual orientation etc.) on price listings on Airbnb.com in San Francisco. We find that hispanic hosts and asian hosts, on average, have a 9.6% and 9.3% lower list price relative to their white counterparts, after controlling for neighborhood property values, user reviews and rental unit characteristics. We don't find any significant impact of gender and sexual orientation on price listings. Overall, our findings corroborate the presence of racial discrimination in the online marketplace.

Peer to Peer e-commerce is increasingly characterized by trends towards the personalization of buyers and sellers in the on-line marketplace. This personalization includes buyer reviews, personal pictures and profiles, and other biographical information intended to reduce buyers’ perceived “purchase risk” or to facilitate trust in the sellers. However, this phenomenon is transforming what started as an essentially “anonymous” market to one susceptible to traditional market failures, including potential racial discrimination, in a manner similar to its brick and mortar counterparts. In this paper, we examine the effect of on-line host information (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) on the price of available rental listings in San Francisco on Airbnb.com. We find that on average, Asian and Hispanic hosts charge 8%-10% lower prices relative to their White counterparts on equivalent rental properties, after controlling for all renter-available information on rental unit characteristics, as well as additional information on neighborhood property values, area demographics, and occupancy rates. We do not find any differences in occupancy rates between minority and White hosts. This may suggest that minorities price lower because they are forward-looking, perhaps due to an expectation of discrimination in the online marketplace or have a preference to increase demand to either maintain their target occupancy level or to attract a larger pool of potential renters to choose from. Overall, our findings are consistent with but not conclusive of a market test of potential racial discrimination affecting Hispanic Airbnb hosts, manifested in an anticipation of disparate market demand for their rentals, and responded to by lower listing prices.

Using a qualitative research paradigm, this study examines audit committee effectiveness from the perspective of audit committee members of New Zealand listed companies. The findings reveal that audit committee members perform a range of overlapping tasks and justify their existence in their audit committees by fulfilling the ‘expectations’ that are placed on them. Many quantitative research studies have examined the association between different dimensions of audit committee inputs and financial reporting outputs. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed and remains far from conclusive (Bédard and Gendron 2010). One of the primary reasons for the inconsistent findings is the lack of understanding of the actual process by which audit committees perform their responsibilities. Using a qualitative research paradigm, this study examines audit committee activities, processes and effectiveness from the perspective of audit committee members of New Zealand listed companies. The study argues that performing audit committee duties is an intended process, whereby audit committee members justify their actions and the effectiveness of their audit committees. The paper contributes to the limited literature on how audit committees operate and, by doing so, provides possible explanations for the inconsistent findings of the quantitative audit committee research. In particular, the paper invites further discussion on whether audit committee members can be (or should be assumed to be) independent when discharging their role of overseeing auditing and financial reporting‐related matters.

The purpose of this paper is to add a meaningful critique to the existing audit committee (AC) literature by providing (i) a critical analysis of the AC literature grounded on agency theory; (ii) a discussion of the emerging new theories of AC, which investigate the people serving on and working with ACs, and (iii) a description of the relationship between these two groups of literature. A number of qualitative AC studies have provided new insights by investigating the actual people serving on and working with audit committees. This review paper summarizes these findings and provides a comparative evaluation with the agency theory-based AC research. This review documents, among others, that the attributes of ACs, as measured by the quantitative literature, have hardly been reflected by qualitative investigation, whereas qualitative analysis of the data contributed by people who have actual experience of ACs questions the fundamental propositions, not only of why ACs exist, but also how they function. This paper provides a cross-examination of the afore-mentioned two paradigms of literature on AC effectiveness and invites corporate scholars to reflect on the differences between the two groups of AC studies.