Audit regulators around the world have expressed concern over market dominance by Big 4 accounting firms and the potential adverse effect it may have on the quality of audited financial statements. We use cross-country variation in the audit market structure of 42 countries to examine two...

Prior research emphasizes the centrality of audit offices in understanding auditing practices, and documents significant inter-office variation in audit outcomes based on industry expertise and office size. Our study examines how two city-specific labor characteristics also affect audit offices...

We use hand-collected audit partner data to show that approximately one-third of clients are audited by partners located more than 100 kilometers away from the clients' corporate headquarters. We explore the role that partner location plays in audits by first modeling how it affects the matching...

UK listed firms are used to investigate if auditor attributes (fixed effects for audit firms, audit offices, and audit partners) add incrementally to baseline models with client controls in explaining audit outcomes (earnings quality and going concern reports). We document that accounting firm...

Francis and Yu (2009) and Choi, Kim, Kim, and Zang (2010) report evidence that Big 4 audits are of higher quality when the engagement office is of larger size: specifically, client earnings quality is higher and auditors in larger offices are more likely to issue going concern audit reports. We...

Prior research finds that clients of high-quality auditors report higher quality GAAP earnings. We extend this research to investigate whether auditor quality is associated with the quality of voluntarily disclosed non-GAAP earnings measures. Using a sample of Australian firms disclosing annual...

This paper updates how archival audit research has evolved since the summary in Francis (2004) of what we knew then about audit quality. The paper describes an evolution from “going big” and asking basic questions about the audit market, institutions, and audit quality, to “going small”...

We show that when banks and borrowers share the same audit firm, borrowers receive lower interest rates, after controlling for potentially confounding director connectedness. The common auditor effect is observed only for opaque borrowers, and is greatest when the same audit engagement office...

Mandatory auditor rotation was recently proposed for the European Union and is also under consideration in the United States. There has been little research into either the benefits or costs of rotation in a true mandatory setting that could inform intelligent policy making. Our paper helps fill...