We examine the costs and benefits of proactive financial reporting enforcement by the UK Financial Reporting Review Panel. Enforcement scrutiny is selective and varies by sector and over time, yet can be anticipated by auditors and companies. We find evidence that increased enforcement intensity...

This study investigates whether the provision of non-audit services (NAS) is associated with accounting quality and whether political connection moderates the relationship between the NAS and accounting quality. The sample includes 2,245 firm-year observations from Malaysia during the period...

We investigate the way auditor characteristics (i.e., reputation and industry specialization) interact on the consequences of mandatory IFRS adoption in Europe in terms of accounting conservatism. Indeed, a mandatory adoption setting may control for firm-level reporting incentives when gauging...

This paper examines the impact of accounting conservatism and auditing conservatism on earnings quality. Four proxies were used to measure earnings quality; persistence, accrual quality, value relevance and smoothness. We use the published annual reports of all the listed firms in the Muscat...

Commonly examined attributes of audit quality in international markets include accounting firm size (proxied for by Big 4 membership) and industry expertise, which is highly correlated with accounting firm size. In this study, we focus on an important but often overlooked sector of the...

To understand the implications of decentralized ledger technology for financial reporting and auditing, we analyze auditor competition, audit quality, client misstatements, and regulatory policy all in a unified framework. We demonstrate how collaborative auditing using a federated blockchain...

We examine the effect of interpretive accounting guidance on a direct and observable cost of financial reporting: audit fees. Many contend that U.S. GAAP has too much interpretive guidance, making it complex and difficult to assimilate. This effect would lead to higher audit effort and higher...

Benford's Law, which is the law of digit distributions, is widely applied to study fraud or bias in a data set. In this paper, we applied Benford's Law to examine the first digits of financial statement items of UK listed companies. The evidence shows that the first digits conform to Benford's...