Policy makers have considered joint-audits as a solution to mitigate the audit market concentration and the “systemic” risk associated with Big 4 auditors. Using the French system as a relevant joint-audit laboratory, we implement a Markovian analysis to infer the long-term market structure...

The Green Paper entitled “Audit policy: Lessons from the crisis” (European Commission, 2010) recommends the introduction of joint audit for European listed companies, based on the French experience, to limit the market dominance of the Big 4 and to promote audit quality. However, the...

We investigate the way auditor characteristics (i.e., reputation and industry specialization) interact on the consequences of mandatory IFRS adoption in Europe in terms of accounting conservatism. Indeed, a mandatory adoption setting may control for firm-level reporting incentives when gauging...

The switch to IFRS in Europe opens the opportunities to investigate the relationship between a drastic change in the complexity of financial reporting standards and the audit market dynamics. Following concerns that mandated IFRS may have increased the domination of the global audit firms, we...