This paper incorporates a classical moral hazard problem with unobserved worker effort and bonus payments into a competitive search equilibrium environment with risk averse workers. The resulting framework permits an analysis of the effects of labour market competition and search frictions on...

The analysis compares two institutional settings in which individuals with complementary task abilities match to found new firms: corporate spin-offs of initially randomly matched production teams and the rational matching of such teams in an incubator organization. The alternative always...

Recently, the Commission of the European Communities has put up for discussion various reform proposals intended to enhance the reliability of audits and to re-establish trust in the financial market. In particular, the EU Commission seeks to strengthen auditor independence and to decrease the...

Although the role of auditing is to increase the reliability of financial statements, surprisingly little is known about addressees’ perceptions of the auditor-client relationship. Using a sample of more than 1,000 U.S. bank-years from 2008 to 2011, we analyze the economic consequences of the...

In its recently published Green Paper, the European Commission 2010 discusses various methods to enhance the reliability of audits and to re-establish trust in the financial market. The Commission primarily focuses on increasing auditor independence and on reducing the high level of audit market...

In the ongoing discussions on audit regulation, the key issues of auditor independence and a high level of audit market concentration have become apparent. However, there is the concern that regulations intended to improve auditor independence (i.e., restrictions regarding the joint supply of...

Accounting Oversight Board have suggested the implementation of the external audit firm rotation. The aims of this proposal are to increase auditor independence and to decrease the high level of supplier concentration in the audit market. However, proponents of this regulation raise the concern...

The optimal reporting frequency is an important issue in accounting. In many production settings, substitution effects across periods occur. This paper shows that the optimal reporting frequency depends on the strength of the substitution effect and on the information content of performance...

Social preferences explain competitive behavior between agents and reciprocity towards a principal but there is no insight into the interaction of competition and reciprocity. We conducted a laboratory experiment with two treatments to address this issue. In a conventional tournament, an agent...