Do monitoring or advisory lead independent directors with financial expertise matter to managerial opportunism?

Motivated by the increasing interest and the monitoring and advisory roles that a lead independent director may play to decrease managerial opportunism; we examine the relationship between monitoring or advisory lead independent directors and managerial opportunism proxied by earnings management. Using a panel data of US firms from 2001 to 2020, we find that monitoring lead independent directors rather than advisory lead independent directors is negative and significantly associated with discretionary accruals. In an additional analysis, we find that advisory rather than monitoring lead independent directors improve earnings persistence and future cash flows, suggesting that both monitoring and advisory lead independent directors play complementary roles when it comes to corporate performance/earnings quality. We also find that, regardless of the role they play within boardrooms, monitoring and advisory lead independent directors with financial expertise have a decreasing effect on discretionary accruals. These findings provide new insights and improve our understanding of how monitoring and advisory lead independent directors contribute to corporate performance in complementary ways.