Board of Directors Characteristics and Internal Control Quality: Evidence from Chinese-listed companies

Using panel data and DK fixed regression, this paper empirically researches the relationship between the board of directors characteristics and internal control quality based on a dataset consisting of listed companies of both Shanghai stock exchange from 2008 to 2012. We find that the internal control quality is significantly inversely associated with general CEO duality, board size, board meetings numbers, significantly positively associate with general the board independence. The independent directors who are not from the area where listed private companies registered is insignificantly related with the internal control quality. These results indicate that board characteristics have great significant impacts on the internal control quality.