Corporate Governance Mechanisms in Saudi Arabia: The Case of Family Ownership with Audit Committee Activity

This paper empirically examines the relationship between one of the major corporate governance attributes; family ownership and the audit committee activity across a sample of 430 publicly traded firms on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) for the period 2012–2019. Using the Pooled OLS regression, this study finds that family ownership is negatively associated with audit committee activity. This study reported that family ownership is negatively associated with audit committee activity, giving support to the convergence-of-interest hypothesis. Therefore, the existence of family ownership as a monitoring corporate governance mechanism substitutes the audit committee activity as another monitoring mechanism. This study provides empirical evidence on the associations of two internal corporate governance mechanisms, namely; family ownership and audit committee activity in the Saudi context where there is a paucity of research in this area. The findings of this study provide a new understanding regarding the extent to which family ownership impacts the activity of audit committees in manufacturing companies. Similarly, the companies’ management, external auditors, bankers, and companies would also benefit from understanding the influential factors of the audit committee activities. KCI Citation Count: 0