董事会特征与审计费用外文文献翻译译文.doc

外文文献翻译译文 原文: Board Characteristics and Audit Fees 1. Introduction The quality of board oversight has received increasing attention in recent years. Directors are being held to higher performance standards, and many groups have called for greater emphasis on the independence, diligence, and expertise of corporate board members e.g.,NACD 1996.Prior research documents several outcomes associated with higher-quality boards, including a lower incidence of financial statement fraudBeasley 1996and fewer SEC enforcement actions for earnings manipulation Dechow, Sloan, and Sweeney 1996. To provide greater insight into board monitoring of the financial reporting process, this paper examines the relations between board characteristics and Big 6 audit fees for Fortune 1000 companies. In this study, all of the companies engaged a Big 6 auditor. Thus, from an outsiders perspective, all of the companies purchased the highest level of audit quality available see Palmrose 1988; Simunic and Stein 1996. However, a more independent, diligent, and expert board may demand differentially higher audit quality which requires more audit work than the Big 6 audit firm normally provides, primarily to protect the boards own interests. The board may seek to protect its reputation capital see Fama 1980; Fama and Jensen 1983; Gilson 1990, to avoid legal liability see Gilson 1990; Sahlman 1990, and to promote shareholder interests by purchasing differentially higher audit quality. Such additional assurance would not be easily observable by outsiders, but as long as the marginal benefits to the directors are greater than the marginal audit costs especially given that the board does not directly pay for the audit, this enhanced assurance may be demanded. The audit fee increases as the auditors additional costs are passed on to the client, such that, after controlling for other variables typically associated with audit fees, we expect positive relations between audit fees and the board charac