Using a large sample of audit client firms, this paper investigates whether and how the geographic proximity between auditor and client affects audit quality proxied by accrual-based earnings quality. We define an auditor as a local auditor if the auditor's practicing office is located in the...

Under the assumption that audit quality relates positively to unobservable financial reporting reliability, we investigate whether audit quality is associated with the predictability of accounting earnings by focusing on analyst earnings forecast properties. The evidence shows that analysts'...

Despite regulatory concerns over opinion shopping (OS) behavior, there exists little systematic evidence on the prevalence and consequences of OS to avoid a going concern opinion (GCO) in today's audit environment. Using 11,628 distressed sample firms over the period 2004–2012 and Lennox's...

We examine the effects of the 1998 merger of Price Waterhouse (PW) and Coopers & Lybrand (CL) on the audit quality of the merged firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) at both the firm- and office-levels, where audit quality is surrogated by the auditor's propensity to issue a going concern opinion,...