Variables

Measures

Representative studies

Dependent variable

Earnings Management

Discretionary Accruals (DA) measured by the modified Jones model

Baxter and Cotter (2009) ; Lin and Hwang (2010) ; Hassan and Ahmed (2012) ; Fodio et al. (2013) ; Etemadi and Moghadam (2014) ; Katmon and Farooque (2017) .

Independent variables Audit Committee characteristics

Audit Committee Size (ACSize)

It is a total number of audit committee Members.

Abbott et al. (2000) ; Dhaliwal et al. (2010) ; Hamdan & Mushtaha (2011) ; Thiruvadi & Huang (2011) ; Aldamen et al. (2012) ; Li et al. (2012) ; Fodio et al. (2013) ; Metawee (2013) ; Abdullahi & Yunusa (2016) ; Lubis and Adhariani (2019) ; Rajeevan and Ajward (2019) ; Meah et al. (2021) .

Audit Committee Independence (ACIND)

The percentage of number of independent director over the total number of directors in the audit committee

Audit Committee Member’s Expertise (ACEXP)

The percentage of members with accounting or financial expertise on the audit committee.

Audit Committee Meetings (ACMT)

Number of meetings of audit committees per year.

Audit Committee Gender (ACG)

The percentage of female members in audit committee.

Control variables

Firm size (Size)

Natural log of total assets.

Bartov et al. (2001) ; Xie et al. (2003) ; Davidson et al. (2005) ; Rahman and Ali (2006) ; Chen et al. (2007) ; Yang et al. (2008) ; Banderlipe (2009) ; Sáenz González and García-Meca (2014) ; Wang and Huang (2014) ; Qamhan et al. (2018) ; Kao et al. (2019) .

Big 4

An indicator variable equal to “1” if the auditor is a Big-4 firm (Price water house Coopers, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst& Young and KPMG), and “0” otherwise.

Al Ani and Mohammed (2015) ; Kao et al. (2019) ; Khan et al. (2021) ; Meah et al. (2021) .

Block holder ownership (BOWN)

the proportion of outstanding shares held by the largest shareholder owning at least 5% of the outstanding shares in a corporation.

Weir et al. (2002) ; Marchica and Mura (2005) ; Thomsen et al. (2006) ; Hillier and McColgan (2006) ; Amran & Che Ahmad (2014) ; Allam (2018) ; Dakhlallh et al. (2019) ; Kao et al. (2019) .