خبرگی مالی کمیته حسابرسی و کیفیت سود: یک متا آنالیز Audit committee financial expertise and earnings quality: A meta-analysis

1. Introduction Audit committee financial expertise is the most prominent feature of audit committee effectiveness that has caught the attention of regulators in recent years (CAQ, 2016; Griffin, 2016). In the USA, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) original definitioni of financial expert, proposed by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), was considered to be too narrow and controversial because it was restricted to only the accounting financial expertise of audit committee members who have qualifications and experience as public accountants; namely, Chartered Professional Accountants (CPAs) and Chartered Financial Analysts (CFAs) (Bryan-Low, 2002). Later, SEC’s final rule broadenedii the scope of audit committee financial experts (ACFEs) under Section 407 of SOX by including accounting financial experts (AFEs) and non-accounting financial experts (NAFEs). Among the latter are financial experts (e.g., investment bankers and financial analysts) and supervisory experts (e.g., chief executive officers (CEOs) and firms’ presidents). Likewise, other countries have specific requirements for ACFEs. A plethora of research explores the effectiveness of the ACFEs’ role in overseeing the financial reporting quality of public companies. There is also an ongoing debate about which type of expertise, by definition, has a stronger association with earnings quality: accounting or nonaccounting expertise. Some studies propose a narrower definition of financial expert (Dhaliwal, Naiker, & Navissi, 2010; Krishnan & Visvanathan, 2008), while others suggest the advantages of a broader definition (Davidson, Xie, & Xu, 2004; Kusnadi, Leong, Suwardy, & Wang, 2014). Further research supports the claim that having both accounting and non-accounting experts on an audit committee can be beneficial in terms of earnings quality (Carcello, Hollingsworth, Klein, & Neal, 2008; Nelson & Devi, 2013).