Corporate Governance Mechanisms and Audit Feature: Evidence from an Emerging Stock Market

This study investigates whether audit fees are impacted by board diversity and ownership structure. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to investigate the correlation between board diversity through the board of directors’ composition which includes the size of the board, the composition of independent members, multiple directorships of the board, board gender diversity, and CEO tenure) —as well as ownership construction which includes Ownership concentration, foreign concentration, and intuitional concentration) and audit features namely, audit fees. Secondary data, which is intended to be gathered from the annual reports of Jordanian enterprises as financial and auditing data, has been used to address this. The control variables are client size, leverage, business complexity, sales internationally, and asset return. The study relationships are tested by using OLS regression. This study also seeks to inspect whether gender diversity on the board influences audit fees. The findings illustrate that some aspects of governance mechanisms influence audit fees This research implies that there is a strong positive correlation between audit fees and ownership concentration, which further supports the notion that financial reporting is reliable. The results indicated a depressing relationship between independent directors' audit fees and the duration of CEOs. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that board size hurt audit fees. The board of directors (many directorships) had a statistically significant impact on the audit fees, according to the results. The results of this study suggest that a key factor in determining audit fees and audit quality is board diversity and ownership structure.