Mécanismes de gouvernance et qualité de l’audit externe: Le cas français

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of governance mechanisms (that is board of directors, audit committee, ownership structure and leverage) on the audit quality, measured by belong to« Big four » and the amount of audit fees. The results of logistic regression shows that only the diligence of board affect positively the demand of audit quality. However, the results of linear regression are more interesting and indicates the existence of some governance structures (the percentage of independent directors, the presence of audit committee, the level of leverage and the institutional ownership) as a majors factors determining the audit quality. The latter is also found to be related to others factors such as the firm size and the international dimension.