In an environment where individual productivity can be increased through efforts directed at a conventional task approach and more efficient task approaches that can be identified through unconventional thinking, we examine the effects of productivity-target difficulty and pay contingent on...

This study identifies auditors who have 100% market shares in a city-industry audit market (hereinafter, monopolist auditors) and examines their pricing strategy. I document that monopolist auditors charge lower fees than do industry specialist auditors. This result is consistent with a...

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) acknowledges that developing independent estimates likely reduces the influence of management bias when auditing accounting estimates. We test this notion, finding evidence that both confirms and contradicts the PCAOB's perspective. We find...

In this study we examine the effect of auditor economic bonding (financial dependency on a client) on audit quality. We consider financial dependency as either abnormally high fees in relation to expected hours or vice versa. We consider audits to have credence goods properties where the client...

This study investigates the combination of textual and numerical accounting disclosures, which are often examined in silos by prior research. Focusing on three inherently complicated footnotes, we capture the amount of text used to explain numbers with the ratio of words to numbers. Using...

We use large detailed data on individual auditor employment to examine the antecedents of turnover decisions and subsequent career paths of diverse individuals in public accounting – namely women and racial minority groups (Asian, Black, and Hispanic). Consistent with the principle of...

We fine-tune a large language model to classify accounting topics within financial disclosures. This allows for the efficient and accurate classification of accounting topics in large volumes of out-of-sample unlabeled text. Specifically, our model leverages innovations in supervised machine...

Leveraging job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, we investigate two mechanisms to reduce accountants’ end-of-day fatigue during busy season. We conduct a field study of public accountants during normal and busy season work periods, collecting bi-daily logs to examine whether the use of...

In this study, we explore a topic of primary concern to small audit firms – attracting new clients. A potential avenue available to small audit firms to enhance their visibility and legitimacy among potential audit clients is to join an association of accounting firms. We examine whether small...