Concerns regarding a lack of competition in the market for public-company audits focus on Big Four audit firms. Little … concern has been raised regarding Non-Big Four firms, yet we know little about competition and barriers to entry in this … market. Prior studies only consider competition from audit firms that already have public-company clients. I examine the role …

Focusing on the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998, we document increased audit quality (measured … by earnings quality of the clients) for the merged firm and other big-X auditors 1 during the post-merger period because … and 2) the value relevance of earnings has significantly increased. Furthermore, we find evidence that in the post-merger …

In this paper, we examine the input-output efficiency of United Kingdom CPA firms using the Data Envelopment Analysis …, and we further find no evidence of persistent efficiency on a multi-period basis. The results of our study may serve as a … yardstick for CPA firms interested in assessing their efficiency relative to their peers, and as a new gauge of CPA performance …

Competition in audit markets is an important topic but direct tests of market competition have been limited. In this … paper, we examine how audit firms behave when they are confronted with competition from another firm in a wide range of …

This paper examines the relation between audit market competition and audit quality. We use the staggered introduction … threat of competition for incumbent audit firms. Using a generalized difference-in-differences design, we find that the … increased threat of competition induced by the opening of a bullet train route in a city leads to a 6.1 percentage point (pp …

, we analyze firm misreporting, auditor monitoring and competition, and regulatory policy in a unified model. A federated … blockchain for financial reporting and auditing can improve verification efficiency not only for transactions in private …

merger. The microstructure of the audit industry provides further insights—Non-Big4 audit firms reduce fees after the merger …