Audit Committee Financial Expertise and Information Asymmetry
2013 American Accounting Association Annual Meeting
49 Pages Posted: 22 Jul 2019
Date Written: March 1, 2019
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
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation