This paper examines the effects of audit firm mergers and the demise of Andersens on market concentration, competitiveness and audit pricing in the UK. Our results indicate that the large audit firms increased their market share between 1985 and 2002 by merging and expanding into new sectors....

We show that book-to-market, size, and momentum capture cross-sectional variation in exposures to a broad set of macroeconomic factors identified in the prior literature as potentially important for pricing equities. The factors considered include innovations in economic growth expectations,...

We combine the innovative approaches of Elliott, Komunjer, and Timmermann (2005) and Patton and Timmermann (2007) with a block bootstrap to analyze whether asymmetric loss functions can rationalize the S&P 500 return expectations of individual forecasters from the Livingston Surveys. Although...

Our study attempts to determine whether, and if so why, the large auditing firms are able to earn a premium on their audit work in the UK. We start by confirming the apparent existence of a Big Firm premium during the period 1985-2002. We examine industry specialisation, non audit service fee...