The relationship between corporate governance and financial reporting quality: evidence from Ghana
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Date
2021
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KNUST
Abstract
Good corporate governance should ensure financial reporting quality, a decrease in agency cost and information asymmetry, that mostly emerges from opportunistic management behaviour. In Ghana, corporate governance and financial reporting quality (FRQ) has attracted a lot of attention in recent times due to the recent banking failures, leading to massive lock up of individual and institutional funds. Financial reporting quality offers assurance to several stakeholders, in addition to providing crucial and useful information. The purpose of the research was to evaluate the relationship between corporate governance (specifically board characteristics) and Financial reporting quality of listed banks in Ghana. The board characteristics considered were Board Size, Foreign Directorship, Board Independence, Board Diversity1 and Audit Committee Independence. The effects of certain factors were controlled via including control variables observed to be related to corporate governance and FRQ. The variables were Big Four audit firms and Firm Size. The empirical research was based on eight listed banks on the Ghana Stock Exchange for a five-year period (2015-2019). The results of the study showed that Foreign Directorship was positively correlated to and held a causative relationship with financial reporting quality unlike Board Size, Board Independence, Board Diversity and Audit Committee Independence which were negatively correlated to and held no causative relationship with financial reporting quality. Hence, high foreign directorship ensured a high financial reporting quality, as among other things, Foreign Directors’ knowledge of foreign markets and network are unmatched. The findings of this study will add to existing knowledge and provide a reference for future academics, students, researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders with interest in the relationship between corporate governance practices and FRQ
Description
A thesis submitted to the department of accounting and finance, college of humanities and social sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of msc accounting and finance