We develop a measure to capture an audit firm's competitive position in a local audit market based on the transaction costs of changing audit firms included in DeAngelo's (1981) multi-period audit pricing model. Our competition measure reflects the size difference between the largest audit firm...

We examine the role of discretionary investments that affect the production of audits of multiple clients. Given such investments and their associated joint fixed costs, the investment decision and production of audit services must be analyzed over a client portfolio, rather than on an...

In this paper, we first develop a model in which national legal environments play a crucial role in determining auditor effort and audit fees. Our model predicts that: (1) audit fees increase monotonically with the strength or strictness of a country’s legal liability regime; (2) given a legal...

We use the release by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board on May 18, 2010 showing its oversight of certain foreign auditors has been denied as a natural experiment to examine investors’ early valuation of the PCAOB’s international audit oversight on U.S. listed foreign companies....