Many legal jurisdictions, including the U.S. and U.K., have passed regulations to address the potential negative impacts of a lack of competition and high concentration in public company audit markets. One consequence of increased regulations, desired or not, is that they have presumably...

This paper investigates the competitiveness of the U.S. audit market and the effects of competition on audit quality. Using a proprietary database of auditor realization rates, we provide the first empirical assessment of abnormal profit persistence in the U.S. audit market following methodology...