SOX-Like Laws in Other Countries
A third worry expressed by SOX skeptics was that the U.S. would drive public company
listings overseas, to regimes less burdened with regulation. Before we review data on that possible
effect in the next section, it is worth noting that many countries imitated the U.S. in adopting SOXlike
statutes or regulations following the market downturn in 2001. (Kim and Lu [2013] provide a
comprehensive listing of corporate governance reforms undertaken in 26 advanced and emerging
economies.) In 2006, for example, Japan adopted its own so-called ‘‘J-SOX’’ statute, the Financial
Instruments and Exchange Law, which contained provisions equivalent to those in both sections
302 and 404 of SOX. In 2006, the European Union, too, adopted an Eighth Directive on securities
disclosure, which largely tracked much of the contents of SOX. One nominal difference between
the way that the European directive was implemented in member states (such as the U.K. and The
Netherlands) was that officer certifications were required, as under SOX section 302, but audit firm
attestations as required in SOX section 404 were not.
More generally, a broader contrast is often asserted between the U.S. ‘‘mandatory’’ regime in
SOX and the ‘‘comply or explain’’ regime in the EU, and it is true that most of the EU member state
implementations include ‘‘comply or explain’’ components. But so too does the U.S. (as discussed
in the prior section). The stark contrast often suggested is an overstatement at best.
A more important distinction between the way that SOX was implemented in the U.S. and how
its equivalents were implemented elsewhere is that the ‘‘comply or explain’’ component is not well
enforced in many non-U.S. regimes. Van de Poel and Vanstraelen (2011) find, for example, that
while firms complying with the Dutch equivalent of SOX section 302 experience fewer abnormal or