The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Reinvention of Corporate Governance?

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Making of Quack Corporate Governance

Capital Structure , Corporate Governance , and the Effect of Sarbanes - Oxley

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act represented a major legislative action designed to increase transparency and accountability in U.S. corporations. Within the context of agency theory and corporate governance, the expectation is that the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley impacted the agency relationship of firms and hence affected the corporate governance structure. With these changes, the question arises as to...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Corporate Investment: A Structural Assessment∗

We assess the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 on corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework, where a dummy for the passage of the Act is allowed to affect the rate at which managers discount future investment payoffs. Using generalized method of moments estimators, we find that the rate U.S. firm managers apply to discount investment projects rises significantly aft...

Was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act good news for corporate bondholders?

This study examines the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on bondholders, a significant investor group that has not been previously considered in the SOX literature. We find that bond values decline around the announcement of events leading up to the passage of SOX, consistent with market participants expecting SOX to impose net costs on bondholders. We further find that the decline in bon...

Corporate Governance Ratings and Financial Restatements: Pre and Post Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Using ratings of corporate governance developed by RiskMetrics Group (RMG), formerly Institutional Shareholder Services, we investigate whether relatively poor governance is associated with financial restatement, and whether restatement results in improved governance. We identify 150 firms that restated their 2003 financial statements to correct material error, and we use Compustat to generate ...