We argue that audit quality has direct and indirect effects on the cost of equity capital. Direct effects are consistent with auditor reputation effects reflecting insurance and/or assurance roles. However, if audit quality is at least in part a reflection of expected assurance levels, then we...

We conduct a detailed examination of the accrual anomaly in Australia using a trading strategy research design. Our primary contribution is to show how sensitive the results are to the precise research design specifications. We focus on four key areas of importance in designing such tests....