Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Sarbanes-Oxley

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    Sentencing Corporate Crime: Responses to Scandal and Sarbanes-Oxley
    (2014) Galvin, Miranda A.; Simpson, Sally S.; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis assesses the effects of the accounting scandals of the early 2000s and the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act (commonly known as Sarbanes-Oxley) on sentences for corporations in federal criminal court. I hypothesize that the time period in which the case was sentenced will exert both direct and interactive effects on the likelihood of harsh punishments and mediate the effects of legal and extralegal variables on the same. This research uses a probit regression model to explore the direct and interactive effects of extralegal characteristics across time with pooled cross-sectional data from the United States Sentencing Commission organizational data series. Companies sentenced during the scandal period were more likely to receive harsh fines, consistent with a collective framing argument. Evidence also suggests that certain offender and offense characteristics are doubly-penalized.
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    Internal Control, Enterprise Risk Management, and Firm Performance
    (2007-08-02) Tseng, Chih-Yang; Gordon, Lawrence A; Business and Management: Accounting & Information Assurance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates two research questions arising from the regulation of internal controls required by Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). The first research question asks whether better internal controls can enhance firm performance? To address this question, the relation between market-value and internal control is estimated by a residual income model. Firms with weak internal controls are identified as those that disclose material weaknesses in internal controls in periodic filings from August 2002 to March 2006, as required by SOX. The empirical results, based on a sample of 708 firm-years with the disclosures of material weaknesses, show that firms with weak internal controls have lower market-value. Building on the' efforts for SOX to improve internal controls, more and more firms are starting to adopt Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), because sound internal control system rests on adequate and comprehensive analysis of enterprise-wide risks. In light of this trend triggered by SOX, the second research question in this dissertation asks whether implementation of ERM has an impact on firm performance? The basic approach to answer this question uses a contingency perspective, since all risks arise from the firm's internal and external environment. More specifically, the basic argument states that the relation between ERM and firm performance is contingent on the proper match between ERM and five key contingency variables: environment uncertainty, industry competition, firm size, firm complexity, and monitoring by the firm's board of directors. A sample of 114 firms disclosing the implementation of ERM in their 2005 10Ks and 10Qs are identified by keyword search in EDGAR database. In developing the proper match, high performing firms are defined as those with greater than 2% one-year excess return to develop the proposed proper match. An ERM index (ERMI) is constructed based on the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) ERM's (2004) definition of four objectives: strategy, operation, reporting, and compliance. The contingency view is supported by the empirical evidence, since the deviation from the proposed proper match is found negatively related to firm performance.