Women on audit committees and the relationship between related party transactions and earnings management

Our results indicate a negative relationship between related‐party transactions (RPT) and earnings management, but a significantly positive relationship between discretionary accruals and the presence of a woman chairing the audit committee. While we observe a positive relationship between RPT volume and earnings quality, we fail to find any relationship between other audit committee characteristics and the latter. One significant result in the article is the positive relation between promoter presence on the audit committee and poor earnings quality. This article documents, for the first time, such a relationship from the perspective of an audit committee, at least in the Indian context.