Audit committee characteristics, audit quality and earnings management in Ghana

This study uses panel data from 15 firms in Ghana from 2010 to 2021. The paper sampled both listed and non-listed financial and non-financial firms. The focus was to cover all listed firms and firms in Club 100 in Ghana. However, the study restricts it to 15 firms, deemed as purposively sampled, whose selection was based on data availability on all the study constructs. The variables in the study are audit committee characteristics, measured as AC independence, AC size, AC gender, and AC meetings. Other variables include EM and audit quality, all of which are obtained from firms’ annual reports. This study used control variables known to influence EM, including leverage, firm size, cash flow, and profits.