Several initiatives and auditors’ professional organizations have argued that assurance about the quality of information, processes, or compliance encompasses the future market base for the accounting profession. However, the market for assurance services is in its formative stage and not well...

Responsive regulation (RR) theory posits that effective regulators enforce compliance by escalating penalties only if persuasion fails, otherwise risking formation of a culture of resentment. Using RR theory as a lens, we examine the interactions between large audit firms and the PCAOB during...

In this paper we argue that audit firms rationally consider the potential reactions of their rivals when deciding how fiercely to compete in a given market. Based on prior literature in the field of industrial organization (Bernheim and Whinston [1990]), we hypothesize that competing with the...

We examine auditor switching conditional on the compatibility of clients and their auditors using a unique text-based measure of similarity of financial disclosures. We find clustering of clients within an audit firm based on this measure. We find that clients with the lowest similarity scores...

Effective consultation is critical for improving the audit of estimates. In an experiment where audit managers acted as consultants to other auditors, we examine conditions in which consultants either recommend estimates that differ substantially from advice-seekers' assessments (contrariness)...

With increased regulatory focus on audits and concerns about whether audit regulation is achieving its stated aims, it is timely to investigate how regulator inspection of audit files and partner rotations may be affecting staffing decisions. This is an important issue, which affects all audits,...

We examine the effect of changes in audit risk standards on the conduct of financial statement audits in a European setting. We investigate this by analysing the audit hours and audit fees for clients of Big 4 audit firms in Finland in 1996 and 2010. Our results show that audit firms became more...

We introduce the concept of fraud morality, validate such conceptualization by prior studies in economics and criminology as well as by our own independent tests, and explore the relationship of fraud morality with numerous cultural attributes using data from the World Values Survey. Applying...

We examine the effect of general, task and industry experience on auditor performance related to the identification of client's business risks (CBR) and identification of entity level controls (ELC) in a construction company. We find the following: (1) increased general experience is only...

We evaluate whether, and under what circumstances, corporate tax aggressiveness influences audit pricing. Using a compound measure of two long-run effective tax rates, we find that tax aggressive firms pay higher fees for external audit services after controlling for factors related to earnings...