Recent accounting and auditing failures have heightened interest in issues of corporate
governance. In an effort to restore investor confidence, the SEC required CEOs to
file sworn statements verifying the accuracy of the firm’s most recent financial statements
and compliance with GAAP by August 14, 2002. The value of this confidence restoring
mechanism is contingent on whether shareholders perceived these reports as
being credible. In this study, we examine the market reaction to early filing of CEO certifications.
We find no reaction to early filing for the market as a whole suggesting that
early filing alone was not necessarily a positive event. Further analysis reveals a positive
relation between abnormal returns at the time of early filing and several corporate governance
related measures, including dividend payments, board size and institutional
ownership. Thus, we conclude that the market reaction to early filing was influenced
by the existence of pre-existing corporate governance mechanisms.