Audit Committee Financial Expertise and Information Asymmetry

Abstract

We examine the association between audit-committee expertise and asymmetric information in the U.S. equity market. Using precise private information extracted from a decomposed bid-ask spread, we find that the existence of an audit committee with financial expertise is negatively associated with information asymmetry. We further find CEO duality to mediate the association between audit-committee financial expertise and information asymmetry. More specifically, we document a significant positive association between the interaction term of CEO duality and audit-committee financial expertise and information asymmetry. Our results are robust to several market-microstructure measures of asymmetric information (e.g., quoted spread, effective spread, price impact, the probability of informed trading), firm-specific characteristics, and market-liquidity measures.

Keywords: audit-committee expertise, information asymmetry, spread, probability of informed trade, price impact

JEL Classification: M41, G3