Prior studies suggest that auditors with short tenure are associated with lower earnings quality because of the lack of client-specific knowledge and/or low balling. In this study, we examine whether industry specialization of auditors and low balling affect the association between auditor...

This paper shows that politically connected non-Big 4/5 auditors are associated with lower levels of audit quality (proxied by the level of abnormal non-core earnings and the proportion of modified audit opinions) than firms with no political connections. We also show that more economically...

We examine whether and how individual auditors affect audit outcomes using a large set of archival Chinese data. We analyze about 800 individual auditors and find that they exhibit significant variation in audit quality. The effects that individual auditors have on audit quality are both...