This study investigates the market's reaction to companies hiring accounting and finance officers directly from their external audit firms - the auditor to - client hiring practice referred to as the ‘‘revolving door.'' The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) eliminated this hiring practice, reflecting...

This article reviews global practices on auditor rotation and discusses the pros and cons of mandatory rotation. While many studies have examined auditor tenure and rotation, I argue that the literature has not yet answered the question as to whether mandatory rotation is desirable. The reason...

This study investigates whether financial reporting quality is affected by an auditor's experience of litigation in the recent past. We find that the likelihood of an accounting misstatement and the magnitudes of misstatements are significantly lower for non-Big 4 auditors who recently suffered...

This study investigates the audit firm's decision to protect its partners' personal assets by becoming a limited liability partnership (LLP). We find that the likelihood of an audit firm switching from unlimited to limited liability is increasing in its size and exposure to litigation risk. We...

Although theory suggests that companies would rationally select into audit even if it were not a legal requirement, many countries impose mandatory audits. This is arguably due to an audit having elements of a public good, which may result in not enough audits being purchased without regulatory...

This study investigates the influence of management over auditor selection decisions during a period in which audit committees have “direct responsibility” for auditor selection. We find that contrary to the intent of SOX, management continues to have significant influence over auditor...

We hypothesize that companies in the same product market avoid sharing the same audit partner when they are concerned about possible information spillovers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that product market rivals are less likely to share the same partner when they perceive that...

Acquirers are motivated to overstate earnings prior to stock-financed acquisitions. We hypothesize that audits help to detect and correct such overstatements. We test this using a difference-in-differences design, which compares audit adjustments to earnings for stock-financed and cash-financed...

Financial reports are prepared on a going-concern (GC) basis rather than a liquidation basis even when companies are highly distressed. This allows distressed companies to report book values of assets that greatly exceed their liquidation values, implying a lack of conservatism in the balance...

We investigate whether PCAOB inspections affect the quality of internal control audits. Our research design improves on prior studies by exploiting both cross-sectional and time-series variation in the content of PCAOB inspection reports, while also controlling for audit firm and year fixed...