Professor Laura Spira

Professor of Corporate Governance

Business School - Faculty of Business

Research activities

Details of my research

  • Corporate governance, the system by which companies are made accountable to stakeholders and society at large
  • Activities of company’s audit committee, a sub-committee of the main board of directors charged with specific monitoring and oversight roles
  • Internal control and risk management in large UK companies

Professor Spira’s current projects include two which deal with issues arising from the Enron scandal: a comparison of approaches to internal control disclosures in the US and the UK, and an investigation conducted in the US, Canada and the UK into the effect of the failure of Arthur Andersen on former employees’ trust in their fellow professionals.

Through her role as Research Relationships Adviser to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, Professor Spira is bridging the gap between practitioners and academics. She helps the ICAEW to make academic research available to its members, and to support ICAEW’s lobbying work.

Find out more

Recent publications

  • Gendron, Y and Spira, L . ( 2009 ). What went wrong? The downfall of Arthur Andersen and the construction of controllability boundaries surrounding financial auditing. Contemporary Accounting Research. (4) View more details »
  • Page, M and Spira, L . ( 2009 ). Economia, or a Woman in a Man's World. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal. (1) View more details »
  • Spira, L . ( 1998 ). The role of the audit committee within the UK framework of corporate governance and accountability . . Oxford Brookes University () View more details »

Media enquiries

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