Motivated by evidence from the empirical accounting and finance literatures suggesting that short sellers target firms with suspect financial reporting, we investigate whether short interest provides a signal of the degree of audit risk. We find a positive association between audit fees and...

We investigate whether auditors are sensitive to litigation risk related specifically to having greater numbers of institutional investors that hold the common stock of a given client. Our findings suggest that audit fees are higher when the number of institutional investors holding stock in the...

We examine auditors' disclosure benchmarking, which we define as auditors' acquisition of non-client financial statement information for the purpose of evaluating a client's financial statement information. Employing a novel dataset that captures auditors' access of non-client annual and...

Accounting regulation is one aspect of the government’s role in protecting the investing public’s interest. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) was an effort by the U.S. Congress to remedy negative effects of earlier major accounting failures. Requirements of SOX highlight the critical role...

We examine whether delays in the expected release of annual earnings have implications for the future auditor-client relationship. Managers have strong incentives to release earnings on schedule and auditors play an important role in helping their clients avoid costly earnings announcement...