Determinants of Audit Committee Diligence

The number of audit committee meetings is the only publicly available quantitative signal about the diligence of audit committees, and private sector bodies and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officials have emphasized the need for frequent meetings of the audit committee. Prior research indicates that the number of audit committee meetings is associated with many “good” outcomes related to financial reporting, but there is little empirical evidence related to the determinants of audit committee diligence. In this paper we examine the association between firm characteristics and the number of audit committee meetings as a proxy for audit committee diligence. Our sample includes 319 firms from the S these results also provide some context to the controversy surrounding the SEC's attempts to define “audit committee financial expert.”