Search

This paper investigates the effects of board cultural diversity, audit committee experience diversity as well as business ethics on the effectiveness of oversight quality on ESG performance. Using Generalized Moments of Methods (GMM), we examine the ESG performance of the firms listed in the Hong Kong Hang Seng Composite Index between 2010 and 2015. We find that board cultural diversity and business ethics have positive correlations with ESG performance while audit committee experience diversity has a negative correlation with ESG performance. In our additional analysis, we observe that board cultural diversity is critical for improving social performance and business ethics is essential for improving environmental and social performance. However, audit committee experience diversity limits firm performance in three areas (environmental, social, and governance) of ESG performance. This is the first study that provides insights to both policymakers and practitioners by highlighting the importance of optimizing the levels of diversity and mandating the improvement of business ethics.

Our research investigates the moderating roles of various board characteristics (independence, gender diversity, tenure, duality, and size) on the curvilinear relationship between board directorships and carbon emissions using a two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) system approach. We use a total of 1582 observations from 391 firms listed in the US Standard and Poor 500 (S&P 500) index collected from 2015 to 2021. Our findings provide empirical evidence in four aspects: (1) there is a U-shaped curvilinear relationship between board directorships and carbon emissions; (2) board directors should not go over two directorships because carbon emissions are likely to increase; (3) board independence, duality, and size positively moderate curvilinear relationships between board directorships and carbon emissions; and (4) board tenure and gender diversity negatively moderate curvilinear relationships. Our study contributes to expanding the existing literature related to sustainable corporate governance in the US market, and also has implications for regulatory issues, business practice, and further research. © 2022 by the authors.

The external auditor cooperates and communicates with the audit committee of a company to ensure effective external audit, including detection of material misstatements in financial statements. Trust is an important element to facilitate information exchange and cooperation. This exploratory research examines the impacts of external auditors’ trust in audit committee members’ competence, integrity and goodwill on perceived quality of their interactions. Through questionnaire survey, the data were collected from audit managers, senior managers, directors and partners in Hong Kong with a response rate of 27.2 percent. Partial least square structural equation modeling and principal component analysis were employed to test the proposed model. The results reveal that the external auditor’s competence trust and integrity trust in the audit committee members are two strong motivators, which improve their interactions with the audit committee. The findings also confirm that perceived quality of interactions during pre-engagement investigation mediates the impacts of competence trust and integrity trust on perceived quality during audit performance stage. The implication of the study is that audit committee members should display high levels of competence and integrity for better interactions with external auditors. These findings provide inspirations for board of directors, executives and policymakers to implement policies that enhance trust among actors to improve audit quality. © 2022 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.