Auditing regulations and bank shareholders’ wealth: An international analysis

This paper examines the ability of auditing regulation to protect bank shareholders’ wealth during the time of normal growth and during the 2007–2009 global financial crises. The study uses the bank regulation database available at the World Bank website. We select a sample of 2467 banks from 107 countries for the years 1999–2009. We perform multivariate regression analyses and find that while auditing regulations enhance bank equity prices in normal growth periods, there is no evidence that auditing regulations are associated with bank share prices during the period of financial crisis. We observe similar results for both developed and emerging countries and for the common and code law countries. Our results suggest an immediate need to strengthen audit regulations so that investor confidence is more likely to persist during periods of financial downturn.