We examine the relationship between the quality of corporate governance and
information asymmetry in the equity market around quarterly earnings announcements.
We use the change in market liquidity (i.e., bid–ask spreads and depths) around
the announcements as a proxy for information asymmetry. We use principal components
analysis to identify three factors, board independence, board structure and board
activity, that capture the information in the eight individual corporate governance
variables we examine. We then use ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares
to estimate the relations between market liquidity changes and the following four
explanatory variables: directors’ and officers’ percentage stock holdings, board