The ownership structures of Western European firms engender agency conflicts between: (i) owners and managers (type I); and (ii) minority and controlling shareholders (type II). Prior research stresses that credible financial reporting ameliorates agency problems by identifying any diversion of...

A firm's decision on whether to choose the same auditor as a close competitor reflects a trade-off between exercising caution to protect its proprietary information and pursuing the benefits of auditor knowledge derived from providing services to comparable clients. We conduct a survey of audit...

Capitalizing on a unique setting in China where auditors disclose their prosocial activities, we examine the role that auditor social responsibility (ASR) plays in shaping their performance. In one direction, the behavior consistency theory implies that individual auditors exhibiting more social...

This study shows that auditors are more likely to charge higher audit fees, issue false-positive going concern opinions (i.e., Type I error), and resign from high asset redeployability (AR) firms. In supplemental tests, we use path analysis to show that the significant associations between AR...

We examine the impact of social ties between mutual fund managers and auditors of public firms on mutual fund stockholdings. We find that mutual funds whose managers are socially connected with firm auditors hold more shares of these firms. In cross-sectional results consistent with...

We examine the impact of clients' tax enforcement on financial statement auditors. In a regression discontinuity design, we exploit the firm-registration-date-based application of a new rule that assigns firms to two different tax enforcement regimes. Our analysis implies that auditors exert...

We examine whether audit partners with prior non-public accounting industry experience conduct higher quality and more efficient audits. We further analyze whether the sequencing and nature of this experience matters by splitting audit partners with prior industry experience into those who...

We examine the role that individual auditors' social capital plays in their audit quality, client acquisition activities, and career advancement. Our analysis focuses on social capital stemming from educational ties, as measured by the size of an auditor's university alumni network among those...

The increase in disclosure about the persons conducting audits has led to a steep rise in research examining the role that individual audit partners play in audit outcomes. Although recent evidence suggests that individual audit partners explain a substantial portion of the variation in audit...

We analyze whether information asymmetry affects three major aspects of the audit process using an instrumental variables research design that exploits exogenous increases in information asymmetry stemming from brokerage house mergers and closures. Consistent with our predictions, we find that a...