Comment les caractéristiques des membres du comité d'audit affectent-elles la gestion des risques de l'entreprise?

Abstract

This work aims to study the concept of risk management which has become essential for companies, especially with the instability of the economic context. This paper focuses on corporate governance, namely the audit committee's composition as a variable impacting the quality of risk management. This work is relevant and provides real added value to the literature, given that this research question has not been addressed previously.

Our results show that companies must give importance to their audit committee, since it significantly impacts the volatility of their operating income. Our empirical results emphasize the importance of including independent and expert members in an audit committee favoring tenure and the presence of female, and finally organizing a significant number of annual meetings. Having such characteristics in an audit committee will result in a reduction in the volatility of operating income, meaning a better enterprise risk management quality.

Regarding Big-cap companies and those paying low audit fees, which both present the case of less risky companies, the empirical results show similar results. Better characteristics of the audit committee translate in these cases into lower volatility of operating income. Consequently, improving the company's effectiveness in facing risks through a better audit committee is less important if the company is riskier by its nature.