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.