Audit Quality and Corporate Governance: Evidence from the Microfinance Industry

Leif Atle Beisland, Roy Mersland and R. Øystein Strøm

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2015, vol. 19, issue 3, 218-237

Abstract: This study uses a unique hand‐collected sample of for‐profit and nonprofit microfinance institutions from 70 developing countries to analyse the relationships between audit quality and governance mechanisms. We examine two measures of audit quality, namely, the use of Big Four auditors and the presence of internal auditors. The empirical analysis of this study reveals that these two quality metrics are highly related, although we also demonstrate that these metrics capture distinctive aspects of audit quality. In particular, the presence of internal auditors is related to other indicators of stricter governance, whereas the use of Big Four auditors is generally unrelated to other governance mechanisms. For situations in which a significant relationship between audit quality and governance does exist, the sign of this relationship is always positive. Thus, our data support the complementarity view of these two traits that is espoused by prior research.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/324008/3/A ... orate-Governance.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:324008

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().