The majority of audit fee research has identified that BIG-N audit firms charge higher fees than other auditors. To detect the reasons for such a fee premium in a concentrated audit market it is necessary to compare audit pricing in the concentrated market to pricing behavior in a competitive...

Managers of multinational companies often favour an aggressive tax avoidance strategy that pushes the legal limits onto the advantage of shareholders and the disadvantage of the spirit of democratically legitimized tax laws. The public and media debate whether such aggressive behaviour is...

The evolution of large international audit firms was driven by client needs and legal regulations specific for the audit industry. The organizational structure of these professional service firms can be characterized as a specific form of a strategic network. The national member firms have to...

Everybody who ascribes a material steering function to moral norms has to give some reasons why rational individuals actually obey these norms. This is a quite natural question to start with, specially for economists. Recently, the philosophers Stemmer (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), Hoerster...

In this chapter I describe important accounting scandals in Germany with respect to their motives, structure of accounting transactions, with related balance sheet and profit and loss items, and the reactions of concerned parties (supervisory board, regulatory agencies, management, auditors, the...

This paper examines the auditor choices of all the IPOs of German firms between 1990 and 1999. The final sample consists of 306 firms. In the IPO context, audit quality can be used as a signal about firm value (information signalling). On the other hand, it can also be used by issuers and...