This study empirically examines the association of audit committee chair tenure and various reporting quality measures in a German setting. As the debate about the role of tenure has refuelled since the German corporate governance codex first introduced an upper limit for director tenure in 2019, this topic is of particular importance. My findings show that longer tenured audit committee chairs are positively associated with higher levels of earnings management and negatively associated with the audit report lag and the likelihood of error identification by the German financial reporting enforcement panel. I draw upon social bonding to discuss these findings, which seem to be heterogeneous from a reporting quality perspective.I argue that social bonding between management and the AC chair drives the results for earnings management, while it does not impair the AC chair's influence on the audit process. My findings are important from a regulatory and practical perspective.

Archival research suggests that female executives have an impact on corporate decision-making and generally finds positive associations between female board representation and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) performance. However, archival research does not reveal why female executives decide differently in the context of CSR. As this is our starting point, we conduct an experiment and examine executives’ decision-making in terms of CSR investment. While female executives seem to be more oriented towards social and ecological practices, we find strong evidence that participants’ real-world incentive program mainly drives their CSR decision-making. We also examine if selected gender-specific character traits (risk propensity, sustainability attitude, and empathy) cause gender differences in executives’ CSR decision-making. In an exploratory analysis, we furthermore show that executives’ risk propensity affects their CSR decision-making conditional on the level of shareholder pressure they face. Our study contributes to the literature on executives’ decision-making and to the CSR literature by enhancing our understanding of determinants of executives’ CSR decision-making.

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Potential investors examine governance characteristics prior to an initial public offering (IPO) to assess the quality and prospects of the issuing firm. One important governance characteristic is board financial expertise, as it provides directors with the relevant knowledge for an IPO process and is valuable for the board’s monitoring duties. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how board financial expertise affects IPO outcomes. To do so, I employ a sample of 414 completed and 85 withdrawn IPOs that were filed from 2014–2017 at NYSE or NASDAQ. I document that the ratio of directors with financial expertise on the board is negatively associated with the level of underpricing and the probability of IPO withdrawal. The results suggest that particularly outside directors with financial expertise have a positive signaling effect and help to reduce information asymmetry around initial public offerings. Above that, using quantile regression, I find that director financial expertise is most valuable for issuances with high levels of investor uncertainty. Therefore, this study makes important contributions to the corporate governance and IPO literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of the effects of board financial expertise on IPO outcomes