Most scholars have indicated corporations using accounting conservatism to reduce earnings manipulation, although certain scholars believe that firms have more incentive to increase earnings manipulation. Institutional investors play an important external monitoring role, and affect firm's...

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it investigates whether high free-cash-flow companies with low-growth opportunities (surplus free cash flow (SFCF)) are associated with income-increasing earnings management. Second, it scrutinizes the effect of audit quality on the...

The European Commission (EC) discusses in her regulation draft of 2011 the external mandatory auditor rotation (audit firm rotation) principally after six years as a reform measure to increase auditor independence, which could complement the internal mandatory rotation (auditor rotation) by the...

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the impact of disciplinary sanctions imposed on Spanish auditing firms and their engagement partners. The disciplinary sanctions resulted from external investigations, which revealed misapplications of auditing standards. In particular, we...

This dissertation investigates how economically-comparable peer firms can be used to obtain inferences about a company’s accounting quality in two different research settings. The first Chapter examines whether auditor industry specialization, measured using auditor market share by industry,...

Prior research suggests that Big 4 auditors provide higher quality audits by virtue of their large size. Still, the recent reforms mandated by the Sarbanes Oxley Act – by increasing client and auditor incentives for accurate reporting – may have narrowed audit quality differences across...