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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Women Involved in the Financial Reporting Process and Financial Reporting Quality

subject

description

We examine how the presence of women involved in the financial reporting process of public companies, and especially the interactions between them (i.e. the simultaneous presence of a woman CFO, women sitting on the audit committee, and women auditors), impacts financial reporting quality. For our sample of large French companies, we find that women do not affect financial reporting quality when interactions are not considered. However, the interactions between women involved in the financial reporting are associated with lower discretionary accruals and higher C-scores (our measure of conservatism), as expected because women are generally more risk averse and have greater ethical sensitivity. Furthermore, our result holds only for non-family firms, which is also expected because there is a greater demand for earnings quality in such firms. In addition, it appears that woman CFOs play a key role in these interactions. Overall, our results support the idea that women affect positively financial reporting quality only if several women are involved at various stages of the financial reporting process and only in specific contexts (i.e. non-family firms). These new results should be of great interest for researchers, investors and regulators.