Auditing standards and anecdotal evidence suggest that accounting personnel's lack of financial reporting competencies can increase audit risk. This study draws on human capital theory to measure the quality of accounting personnel based on their education level and obtains evidence of how the...

We examine whether and how individual auditors affect audit outcomes using a large set of archival Chinese data. We analyze about 800 individual auditors and find that they exhibit significant variation in audit quality. The effects that individual auditors have on audit quality are both...

This study investigates whether companies engage in audit opinion shopping activities by exerting influence over an audit firm's decision to switch the engagement partner (“partner-level opinion shopping”) in the Chinese setting, where the identities of engagement partners are publicly...

We identify connected auditors as those who attended the same university as the executives of their clients. Using manually collected data from China, we find that connected auditors are more likely to issue favorable audit opinions, especially for financially distressed clients. Moreover,...

This study examines how audit-partner gender-diversity impacts audit quality, using data from China, where two partners are assigned to lead each engagement. Female and male partners bring different resources, in the form of information, expertise, experience, and perspectives that could result...