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The audit committee chair can play a key role in the success of audit committee outcomes. The role of the chair is different than that of the other audit committee members. However, most of the research on audit committees does not distinguish the role of the chair from that of the other committee members. Moreover, research does not give any insight into the necessary abilities to fulfill this role. Our study investigates the audit committee chair's abilities. Based on 27 interviews, we find that the chair manages multiple relationships and possesses well‐developed leadership abilities that go beyond financial expertise, such as various types of communication skills. Our research sheds light on the unique role of the audit committee chair. It also provides useful insights to corporate boards and policy‐makers to help them identify the audit committee chair with the right abilities.

Corporate governance best practices, especially when not mandated, usually mitigate risk and provide value added (Agrawal & Knober, 1996). Many authors have demonstrated a link between corporate governance and institutional and regulatory environments (Claessens & Yurtoglu, 2012;LaPorta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer & Vishny 1998;Liu, 2006;Matoussi & Jardak, 2012) and even political power (Claessens & Yurtoglu, 2012). Political connections are known to result in numerous privileges for firms, such as decreased regulatory oversight (Faccio, 2006) and improved financial performance. This paper investigates compliance with governance regulations and political connections as separate topics, as other studies have done, but also looks at their combined effect by analyzing data on the financial performance of S&P/TSX companies. Our results show that regulatory compliance alone does not significantly impact on financial performance, political connections alone have a positive and very significant effect, and both factors combined have a more positive and significant impact than they have individually. We conclude that the analysis confirms our research hypotheses.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of ownership structure on dividend policy in the context of an emerging market. In the academic literature, covering various economic contexts, research shows contradictory results. Therefore, based on a sample of 146 observations, we analysed the relationship between the ownership structure and the dividend policy in Morocco. The results of our study show a positive and significant relationship between ownership structure and dividend policy; however, one of the ownership structures (institutional ownership) did not show a significant relationship with dividend policy. Our results are surprising as they contradict Aguenaou et al. [1] and Pablo and González [2] who instead find negative relationships. Our results add to the existing literature by providing unique results in an emerging market such as Morocco.