Impact of Retained Ownership, CEO-Chair Duality, and Foreign Equity Participation on Auditor Choice of IPO Firms: Evidence from an Emerging Market

Abstract

In this paper we study the impact of corporate governance characteristics on IPO firms’ auditor choice in an emerging market setting. We use three corporate governance attributes – CEO-Chair duality, retained ownership, and foreign equity participation to test the impact of ownership structure on auditor choice of 129 Bangladeshi firms that went public during the period 1990 to 2005. Our findings from logistic regression suggest that CEO-Chair duality and the degree of foreign equity participation are significant determinants of auditor choice while proportion of board ownership is not. In addition, issuer size and whether the issuer is a green field operation also influence auditor choice while the length of a firm’s operating history does not seem to matter. Our findings support agency theory prediction that (at least one category of) principals (foreign shareholders in this case), are likely to trade-off higher monitoring costs (of hiring a higher quality auditor) with agency costs arising from asymmetric information, primarily borne by absentee owners. It also supports the signaling role managers of green field operations play by hiring higher quality auditors to mitigate the uncertainties associated with their offerings.