Corporate governance mechanisms and the early-filing of CEO certification

Recent accounting and auditing failures have heightened interest in issues of corporate governance. In an effort to restore investor confidence, the SEC required CEOs to file sworn statements verifying the accuracy of the firm’s most recent financial statements and compliance with GAAP by August 14, 2002. The value of this confidence-restoring mechanism is contingent on whether shareholders perceived these reports as being credible. In this study, we examine the market reaction to early filing of CEO certifications. We find no reaction to early filing for the market as a whole suggesting that early filing alone was not necessarily a positive event. Further analysis reveals a positive relation between abnormal returns at the time of early filing and several corporate governance related measures, including dividend payments, board size and institutional ownership. Thus, we conclude that the market reaction to early filing was influenced by the existence of pre-existing corporate governance mechanisms.