3. Hypothesis development
The importance of corporate governance has been a question of substantial interest to
regulators, financial institutions, investors, and the media. Governance problems arise
from divergent incentives and asymmetric information between shareholders and
managers. These conflicts of interests, coupled with the impossibility of writing
explicit contacts on all future contingencies, lead to unresolved agency problems that
affect firm valuation (Hart, 1995). Corporate governance mechanisms are intended to
mitigate agency costs by increasing the monitoring of management’s actions and
limiting managers’ opportunistic behavior (Ashbaugh et al., 2004). In this section,
several hypotheses are developed that identify and link specific elements of
governance to accounting earnings