An example of quantitative research in Accounting & Finance: audit committee independence

I make use of Al-Najjar (2011) as an illustration of a quantitative research in Auditing. Al-Najjar's article examines the determinants of audit committee independence for some UK firms from 2003 to 2008. The initial part of the article describes the main research objective of the article and justify its academic value. One of the justifications is that the topic has not been much investigated by others so far. Al-Najjar (2011) comes up with some determinants of audit committee independence as informed by some literature review effort. These determinants are then used to formulate some hypotheses. Some examples are as follows:

Hypothesis 1: Audit committee independence is negatively related to firm size
Hypothesis 2: Audit committee independence is related to financial leverage

Al-Najjar (2011) then offers a data gathering strategy based on sample panel data, which are then analyzed with a multiple regression analysis. The multiple regression formula takes the following form:

Audit committee independence (dependent variable y) = y-intercept + b1(firm size [independent variable 1]) + b2 (growth opportunities [independent variable 2])... etc....

Subseqently, the article presents the data findings and provides data analysis using multiple regression analysis. The final section of the article is, as expected, "Summary and Conclusions".


Reference
Al-Najjar (2011) "The Determinants of Audit Committee Independence and Activity: Evidence from the UK" International Journal of Auditing 15, pp. 191-203.