Internal governance mechanisms and value relevance of accounting earnings: an empirical study in the French context

The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of internal governance mechanisms related to the board of directors, the audit committee and the ownership structure on the value relevance of accounting earnings in the French context. Using the method of Panel Corrected Standard Errors in the context of panel data, we find that the CEO duality and the existence of an audit committee have a negative effect on the value relevance of accounting earnings while the ownership concentration and the institutional ownership contribute to increase the value relevance of earnings. Furthermore, the empirical results show that leverage and growth have a positive effect on the value relevance.