The Effect of Audit Committee Characteristics on the Profitability: Panel Data Evidence | Oroud | International Journal of Economics and Finance | CCSE

This study attempts to investigat the relationship between audit committee characteristics (size, independence, meeting and financial expertise) and the profitability of industrial companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) for the years 2013 to 2017. The model of this study is theoretically founded on both the agency theory and the resource dependence theory. To examine the developed model, the data were gathered from the annual reports of 51 listed industrial firms. To analyse the data, this study utilized the panel data methodology on 51companies with 255 observations. Moreover, this study used company size and leverage as control variables. Based on the panel data results, the fixed-effect model was used to examine the effect of the experimental variables on profitability, measured by return on investment (ROI) and return on equity (ROE). The results show that the audit committee characteristics have a significant effect on profitability of the industrial companies listed on the ASE. This study evinces that the RD theory is more significant compared to the agency theory when describing CG practices in Jordan