Revisionsutskott i svenska aktiebolag
En statistisk analys
The recent development in several countries? legislation and best practice recommendations in relation to corporate governance in general and audit committees in particular have affected Swedish listed corporations in the form of the Swedish Corporate Governance Code and the coming EU-directive. This paper aims to discover what factors affected Swedish listed companies to form audit committees when this was entirely voluntary. We collected data from the annual reports of 121 Swedish listed companies and formed eleven hypotheses as to what factors we believed affected the voluntary formation of audit committees based on Agency Theory, economies of scale and circumstances specific to the Swedish environment. We then analyzed the data through the use of a multivariate logistic regression model. Our results showed that the size of the company, the number of employees? representatives on the board of directors, the number of shareholders with a holding of more than 10 % of the votes and the holdings of the ten largest shareholders were statistically significant. Thus, we conclude that country specific factors and economies of scale affect the voluntary formation of audit committees. The concentration of ownership and the largest shareholders also affect the existence of audit committees.