Estimating the Effect of Auditor Tenure on Audit Quality : Methods and Implications

After several major financial scandals, mandatory auditor rotation was raised as a measure to improve the auditor independence. For regulators who are to set mandatory rotation limit need detailed information about the turning points of the inverted U-shaped relationship between audit quality and auditor tenure, such as the statistical implication of a representative turning point of audit quality obtained by OLS estimation based on quadratic model or even the entire distribution of the sample firm-auditors' turning points. These two problems remain unsolved. This paper derived the statistical implication of the representative turning point of audit quality obtained by OLS estimation based on quadratic model. This paper also proposed an estimation method based on survival analysis to estimate the entire distribution curve for the turning points of all the sample firm-auditors in the form of their cumulative probability curve. Mote Carlo simulation was used to the performance of various estimation methods, such as accuracy, robustness, and information usefulness