SYNOPSIS: We interview 21 U.S. company directors regarding the perceived benefits and costs of serving on multiple boards concurrently, leveraging the reputational and busyness perspectives on board service. Multiple concurrent board service provides directors with general and specific learning benefits that can carry across industries, reflecting the reputational perspective. The directors recognize but often downplay concerns with overall workload challenges; such costs are the focus of the busyness perspective. We extend the busyness perspective in two ways. First, we find evidence that scheduling challenges (e.g., overlapping board meetings) are a constraint on multiple board service. Thus, it is the timing of work that often is a constraint, not the amount of work. Second, we highlight the important role of "appearances" of busyness, with some directors noting efforts to avoid stakeholder scrutiny of their busyness, such as by "informally" serving on an audit committee or serving on private company boards.

Audit committees (ACs) are a topic of significant research interest, with numerous studies published each year. We synthesize AC findings from articles published between 2010 and 2020 to develop a conceptual framework encompassing AC inputs, processes, and outputs. We then provide new insights related to AC characteristics, AC relationships, the AC environment, and AC oversight processes. We encourage future research addressing underexamined AC characteristics (e.g., diversity, busyness, and tenure); AC relationships, environment, and processes; and outcomes related to internal audit and internal controls. We also encourage researchers to focus on four contemporary AC issues (remote work; new technologies and cybersecurity; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and climate; and AC workload) and to embrace diverse research methods and theories. We provide numerous specific research questions to guide future research toward advancing our understanding of ACs and their impact on corporate governance.

We examine the effects of information technology material weaknesses on a firm's reputation by examining how management's actions before and after disclosure influence investors' trust in management and perceptions of investment risk. Specifically, we look at the influence of: 1) management taking responsibility for an information technology material weakness, and 2) replacing the CFO with someone with technology expertise. We find that management taking responsibility for a material weakness does not lead to increased trust in management before or after remediation. However, investors perceive more favorable market reactions to remediation when management had previously taken responsibility for the control weakness. Further, we find that replacing the CFO with someone who has technology expertise results in increases in investor trust and improvements in perceptions of investment risk after control weakness remediation. This suggests the importance of sending clear signals to investors that the company is hiring managers with appropriate technology expertise.

ABSTRACTThis study uses experimental economic markets to investigate the impact of risk and the potential for loss on managers' demand for audit quality. We posit that these two important contextual factors influence managers' audit quality preferences. We study these factors because they are ubiquitous to companies, and we focus on their influence on managers because managers continue to play a significant role in the auditor hiring process and we know relatively little about their auditor preferences. We predict that risk, the potential for loss, and their interaction will each decrease manager demand for high audit quality due to a desire to achieve greater reporting flexibility. Experimental results are consistent with our predictions; specifically, increased risk, the potential for loss, and to a lesser extent their interaction, significantly reduce managers' likelihood of hiring the best available auditor in the market. Path analysis indicates that this reduction in audit quality demand leads to increases in misreporting. Finally, we observe investors overpaying for assets to a greater extent when managers hire lower‐quality auditors. Our results show that the contextual factors of risk and the potential for loss, which are ubiquitous to companies, can reduce demand for audit quality, which can increase misreporting behavior and ultimately harm investors.

In this study, we investigate the financial reporting behavior of chief financial officers (CFOs) with significant prior audit experience. Our tests indicate that, on average, CFOs who were former audit managers or partners report less aggressively than CFOs without prior audit experience. Thus, the mindset that auditors develop during their time in public accounting – which should value objective, transparent, and conservative financial reporting – appears to persist when auditors take high-level positions in industry. However, we also find that the reporting behavior of prior-auditor CFOs becomes more aggressive over time as the salience of their audit experience decays. Further, we find that audit fees are lower for clients with prior-auditor CFOs but increase as the CFOs’ time away from auditing increases. Overall, our study offers important insights regarding how audit experience is associated with the financial reporting behavior of CFOs.

We advance social identity theory in the context of corporate governance research by evaluating how experiences outside the audit committee (AC) relate to AC members’ (ACMs’) professional identities and how these identities then map into ACMs’ responsibilities, how ACMs perceive that they add value, and how ACMs aid in the resolution of difficult judgments and decisions. We identify and evaluate four non-exclusive ACM social identities: executive management, financial management, investment management, and audit partner. We find that prior experiences relate to the social identities with which ACMs identify, yet identities also develop without role-relevant experiences. Interpreting the interviews leads us to propose a novel theory – mediational activism – a hybrid perspective whereby the ACM acts in multiple seemingly incongruent modes as a monitor, collaborator, and/or advocate with the intent to organize collective understanding, action, and mutually equitable outcomes. We find that ACMs’ perceptions of their primary role-relevant responsibilities are consistent with agency theory and extensive mediational activism, while perceptions of value-add are more consistent with the theory of resource dependence and reflect the desire to leverage prior experiences. Finally, we provide evidence on a host of difficult judgments and decisions that ACMs oversee, and find that they sometimes use typical negotiation strategies such as contending and compromising, but rarely resort to offering concessions. Employing these strategies differs based on social identities, but regardless of their identities ACMs most commonly approach their oversight role in resolving difficult judgments and decisions by adopting a mediational activism perspective.

SUMMARYWe develop and test a model that anticipates detrimental performance effects in within-office distributed teams (i.e., teams based out of the same office that conduct work at different geographic locations). This setting offers a clean test of theory around distributed work because it eliminates confounding factors such as differences in culture and language. Using an experiential questionnaire we find that greater distribution is negatively associated with team communication (quality, ease, and spontaneity) and auditors' sense of shared context (access to the same information, mutual understanding, and common norms), which are in turn negatively associated with engagement performance (efficiency, commitment to excellence, overall work quality, adhering to the budget, and the team's innovative approach). Further, we find an indirect effect between distribution and performance through communication and shared context when accountability is lower, but not higher, implying that accountability interventions have the potential to aid performance quality in distributed teams.Data Availability: Contact the authors.

ABSTRACT We use experimental economic markets to examine the impact of changing institutional design features on audit quality. Specifically, we manipulate auditors' economic accountability to managers by altering who hires the auditor—a manager or an independent third party—and auditors' psychological accountability to investors by explicitly stating that the auditor is hired on the investors' behalf. Our design shifts auditors' accountability from managers, who have directional goal preferences, to investors, who prefer judgment accuracy. We find that removing auditors' economic accountability to managers and replacing it with psychological accountability to investors significantly increases audit quality. This increase in audit quality occurs despite the independent third party randomly hiring auditors. In an additional treatment, we incorporate auditor accuracy into the third-party hiring algorithm and find even higher audit quality. Our results suggest that altering auditors' accountability relationships can significantly enhance audit quality. Data Availability: The laboratory market data used in this study are available from the authors upon request.

We use experimental economic markets to examine the impact of changing institutional design features on audit quality. Specifically, we manipulate auditors’ economic accountability to managers by altering who hires the auditor – a manager or an independent third party – and auditors’ psychological accountability to investors by explicitly stating that the auditor is hired on the investors’ behalf. Our design shifts auditors’ accountability from managers, who have directional goal preferences, to investors, who prefer judgment accuracy. We find removing auditors’ economic accountability to managers and replacing it with psychological accountability to investors significantly increases audit quality. This increase in audit quality occurs despite the independent third party randomly hiring auditors. In an additional treatment, we incorporate auditor accuracy into the third party hiring algorithm and find even higher audit quality. Our results suggest that altering auditors’ accountability relationships can significantly enhance audit quality.