Beasley (1996) finds that the likelihood of fraudulent financial reporting increases with board size. Beasley’s result suggests that smaller audit committees may be more effective than larger committees. If smaller committees are more effective, audit committee size might be associated with a higher incidence of going-concern reports for financially distressed companies.
We add audit committee size to the model presented in table 4. While audit committee size is not significant (p > 0.10), all our other inferences are unaffected.