The impact of the board of directors and the audit committee on the transparency of financial information of companies listed in a frontier market

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the impact of factors representing the Board of Directors (BOD) and Audit Committee (AC) on financial information transparency (FIT) in a frontier market. FIT is measured through three indicators that reflect financial non-transparency: earnings aggressiveness (EA), earnings smoothing (ES) and loss avoidance (LA). Research data was collected from 338 companies listed on the Vietnam Stock Exchange (HOSE and HNX) from 2012 to 2022. The study uses the panel data analysis method through OLS, FEM, REM regression steps and necessary tests to select the appropriate analysis model. At the same time, model defects are handled by GLS and Robust regression. Our findings show that the factor representing BOD tends to increase the transparency of financial information, while the factor representing AC tends to decrease the transparency of financial information. This is the first study to examine the impact of composite factors representing BOD and AC and their component factors on FIT.

Keywords

• Audit committee representative
• Board of director representative
• Earnings aggressiveness
• Earnings smoothing
• Financial information transparency
• Loss avoidance