There have been debates on adoption of corporate laws regarding electing independent audit committee members separately and double derivative suit, as well as mandatory cumulative voting to improve corporate governance in Korea. This article examines whether mandatory or market based approaches are desirable to improve corporate governance in Korea. It will explore the ways to strengthen the independence of the board of directors and audit committees. Firstly, this article studies the independence of outside directors in the U.S. and Korea. The independence of the board of directors has been weak in Korea due to controlling shareholders and circular share-holding ownership structure among big business groups, even though there have been attempts to improve this situation. Secondly, this article examines the current role of outside directors, audit committees, and cumulative voting in the U.S and in Korea to find out positive changes in corporate governance Korea. Lastly, his article will discuss the appropriate direction between mandatory and market based soft law approaches on corporate governance in Korea. It will argue that Korea needs to strengthen the monitoring function of the board of directors, independence of outside directors and audit committee.

This study investigates the direct and indirect effects, mediated by audit committee quality, of managerial ownership, institutional ownership, and profitability on intellectual capital (IC) disclosure. The object observed of this study is companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) in the 2014-2018 period that are classified as high intellectual capital-intensive industries. Based on the sampling method, purposive sampling, 51 companies were selected as samples. This study used path analysis techniques with IBM SPSS version 25 to study the direct and indirect influences of managerial ownership, institutional ownership, and profitability toward IC disclosure. The results of this study show that managerial ownership, profitability and audit committee quality have a significant positive effect on IC disclosure whereas institutional ownership has significant negative effect on IC disclosure. This study also provides empirical evidence, supported by the sobel test, that the audit committee quality is able to mediate the effect of institutional ownership and profitability on IC disclosure. However, the audit committee quality is not able to mediate the effect of managerial ownership on IC disclosure. These findings develop and strengthen the results of prior studies related to the implementation of signaling theory and agency theory in devoting more understanding about IC disclosure.

This study examines the relationship between the effectiveness of an audit committee and the amount of audit fees. The sample consists of 130 manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) in 2016–2017. Data are obtained from the IDX and company’s annual reports. The effectiveness of an audit committee is measured by independent audit committee size, frequency of audit committee meetings, and expertise of the audit committee. Results show first that the size of the independent audit committee has a positive effect on audit fees. This finding suggests that an increase in the number of independent audit committee members produces a higher quality of reporting, and so they tend to choose a reputable public accountant. Second, the frequency of its meetings has positive effects on audit fees. It suggests that the more effective the supervision of the committee to improve audit quality, the higher the audit fees to be paid. However, this study fails to provide evidence that the expertise of the audit committee affects audit fees. The result of this study suggests that the audit committee tends to adopt the demand approach based on the reputation of the public accounting firm accountant firm in determining the amount of audit fees.