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This paper aims to examine whether external monitors (auditors and analysts) constrain earnings strings, an indicator of earnings management, and whether this monitoring is more effective after the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), given the emphasis of SOX on improving auditing, financial reporting and the information environment.

Agency theory establishes the premise between external monitoring and earnings strings. Auditor tenure and number of analysts following provide measures for external monitoring quality. Using prior research, empirical models explaining the presence of an earnings strings and earnings strings trend are developed to test the hypotheses.

Pre-SOX, extreme auditor tenure, indicating lower quality external monitoring, is associated with greater earnings strings trend, and analyst coverage is associated with increased likelihood of earnings strings and greater earnings strings trend consistent with analyst pressure on management. More effective auditor and analyst monitoring occurs post-SOX in terms of reduced likelihood of earnings strings and earnings strings trend.

The authors provide evidence on how elements of external monitoring are associated with increased earnings strings pre-SOX. Further, they contribute to the debate on the impact of SOX on external firm monitoring and the overall financial information environment. By focusing on earnings strings, the outcome of earnings management, the authors provide a unique understanding of external monitoring that also provides insight on the overvaluation of equity and ultimate destruction of firm value. The evidence demonstrates how regulation has contributed to an improved financial reporting environment and external monitoring.

We investigate whether external investment banks or internal key IPO insiders such as company directors and officers, venture capitalists and institutions that hold an IPO's stock serve as effective monitors of IPO investments over the post-IPO period. We measure median changes in each group's holdings for the sample, finding large changes in these values during a long-run holding period. We find that long-run buy-and-hold returns (BHARs) are positively related to the lead investment bank underwriter reputation and the gross spread demonstrating that the external monitoring by investment banking firms increases the post-IPO firm's value. Holding the underwriter reputation constant, we find that the BHARs are positively related to the gross spread, also indicative of the value of monitoring by external investment banks.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the individual and joint influence of three distinct external leadership behaviors (i.e. networking, representing, and external monitoring) on workgroup performance and managerial effectiveness.

Data were gathered by surveying subordinates of 233 managers in various types of organizations.

The results of multiple regression analyses indicated that external monitoring and representing were positively related to subordinate perceptions of workgroup performance and managerial effectiveness. The effects of networking depended on a leader’s use of the other two external behaviors.

Understanding why a leader is effective in a particular context requires examining joint effects and different patterns of external behavior (Yukl, 2012). Past research on external leader behavior only examined one of the specific behaviors or examined a broadly defined behavior that included more than one of the three specific behaviors. The study provides new insight into the independent and joint effects of the three external leadership behaviors on managerial effectiveness and workgroup performance.

This study aims to examine the impact of board characteristics on debt choice.

The sample comprises of unique nonfinancial firms listed in the FTSE 350 over the period 2011–2018. This study uses Tobit and OLS regressions to check the impact of board characteristics on debt choice. The results are robust to the battery of robust checks.

This study finds that board size and board independence are positively associated with public debt. However, CEO duality and board meetings frequency are inversely associated with public debt. Overall, the findings are consistent with the “financial intermediation theory” that the firms with weak governance rely on bank financing, and firms with better corporate governance go for public debt.

This study offers significant insights for investors and policymakers.

This study offers new insights regarding the role of board characteristics in firms’ debt choice by showing the significant impact of board characteristics on debt choice. The findings indicate that the board’s efficient internal monitoring may substitute external monitoring by the bank.

Based on 3,775 firm-year observations from 2009 to 2013 using publicly available disclosure data for Korean listed firms, this study examines whether and how firm-level governance characteristics are associated with investment in internal auditing proxied by compensation and the number of statutory internal auditors.

The authors investigate the association between governance characteristics and investment in internal auditing proxied by compensation and the number of statutory internal auditors.

The authors find that firms with greater ownership of the largest shareholders and with a higher proportion of outside directors invest more in internal auditing. These results indicate that firms with higher incentive and demand for monitoring are more likely to invest more in internal auditing. The authors further find that the positive effect of the largest shareholder ownership (board independence) on investment in internal auditing is attenuated in firms with greater board independence (ownership of the largest shareholders) suggesting that the complementary effect of the two governance mechanisms associated with internal auditing weakens as they function simultaneously.

The results provide regulators and investors with a clear picture of the governance characteristics of firms associated with investment in internal auditing. The results imply that both the largest shareholders and the outside board of directors play a significant role in resource allocation in internal auditing within a firm. The effect of allocation, however, can be attenuated contingent upon the combined characteristics of governance mechanisms.

Using large amounts of public archival data, this study adds to the extant literature on firm characteristics associated with investment in internal auditing. This study also contributes to the literature by expanding the scope of research on executive compensation to the locus of statutory internal auditors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, in an Egyptian context, the external auditor type (Big 4 vs local) implications on reporting quality proxied by discretionary accruals (DA) and also examine whether auditor type impacts the market’s pricing of DA, where pricing is considered a proxy for the perceived DA quality.

The sample period is 2012–2015, that is meant to be post the Egyptian revolution financial crisis; all Egyptian stock exchange (EGX) listed firms (except banks and financial institutions) are considered. DA are estimated using modified Dichev and Dechow’s (2002) model (McNicholas, 2002). Ordinary least squares regression tests are used to investigate the external auditor type implications on DA level and the related EGX investors’ pricing.

The findings generally show the external auditor’s minimal role in mitigating DA. Moreover, the findings reflect the EGX investors’ negligence and/or lack of confidence in regards to DA and external auditor type factors in stock pricing.

The paper findings highlight to regulators the need for effective monitoring of audit firms earnings management mitigation performance to help reinforce investor confidence in financial reporting quality.

This paper is the first that investigates the external auditor monitoring mechanism implications on investors’ perceptions of earnings quality in Egypt. The paper findings would provide important contributions, particularly post the Egyptian revolution crisis, where the EGX market is trying to restore the investors’ confidence.

Prior research has examined the impact of corporate governance mechanisms, including external auditing, on accounting restatements likelihood. However, little is known about auditor’s monitoring role in restatement disclosure practices. The purpose of this study is to address this gap by investigating the impact of auditor’s oversight on the timeliness of accounting restatement disclosures as measured by the length of the restatement dark period.

The study examines panel data from a sample of restating publicly traded US firms. Negative binomial regression is used to analyze the data because the dependent variable is a count variable and is over-dispersed.

The main study’s results indicate that longer auditor tenure and non-audit services provision improve restatement disclosure timeliness. Conversely, companies whose auditors exerted abnormally high levels of audit effort have longer restatement dark periods.

This study is the first archival research that focuses on auditor’s monitoring role and its impact on the timeliness of restatement disclosures. By doing so, this study contributes to the auditing academic research, professional practice and regulation by providing empirical evidence on an exasperating issue for all participants in the financial markets. In addition, it provides a better understanding of auditor’s monitoring role in the accounting restatement process and offers insights to policymakers, practitioners and investors interested in corporate financial transparency and corporate governance.

Preservation environments such as repositories need scalable and context-aware preservation planning and monitoring capabilities to ensure continued accessibility of content over time. This article identifies a number of gaps in the systems and mechanisms currently available and presents a new, innovative architecture for scalable decision-making and control in such environments.

The paper illustrates the state of the art in preservation planning and monitoring, highlights the key challenges faced by repositories to provide scalable decision-making and monitoring facilities, and presents the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide such capabilities.

The presented architecture makes preservation planning and monitoring context-aware through a semantic representation of key organizational factors, and integrates this with a business intelligence system that collects and reasons upon preservation-relevant information.

The architecture has been implemented in the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite. Integration with repositories and external information sources provide powerful preservation capabilities that can be freely integrated with virtually any repository.

The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.

The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results enable proactive, continuous preservation management through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

This paper examines the association between audit committee (AC) governance characteristics and their role effectiveness. Its objective is to contribute a more comprehensive model and new evidence from Australia that complements and extends recent studies from different country settings on characteristics, roles and effectiveness of ACs.

The sampling frame is Australian listed companies, over the years 2004 to 2009, consisting of 180 observations. The study applies multiple regressions to validate the hypotheses and models.

Results reveal that stronger AC independence and competence, but not diligence, is significantly related to a lower incidence and severity of financial restatements (i.e. to a higher integrity of financial statements). However, greater AC diligence, but not independence or competence, is significantly related to lower non‐audit fee ratio (i.e. to higher external auditor independence).

The paper highlights salient links between an AC's governance characteristics and its effectiveness in fulfilling certain governance roles. Also it expands current literature by presenting a comprehensive empirical model along with statistical measures for AC governance characteristics.

Previous studies have not drawn AC governance characteristics together in a comprehensive model or provided evidence beyond the North American and European setting. A further original feature is the measurement of AC competence in terms of collective members' combined financial sophistication and industry knowledge.

To provide a history of the emergence of quality systems from the mid‐1980s. To show how quality became a primary policy concern in higher education policy. To map the development of quality processes and raise questions about dominant approaches and express concerns for the future.

Historical document analysis.

The problems in institutionalising quality are analysed and it is concluded that the British system of quality monitoring failed to engage with transformative learning and teaching.

As the UK developments guided many other countries into developing a system of quality, the UK history of the emergence and development of quality processes 1985‐2005 is of interest to international readers. It identifies both good practice and what to avoid.

The historical analysis reveals how quality evaluations were guided as much by political pragmatism as rational evaluation.