Big Four accounting firms increasingly focus on non-audit services. Failures in these services may impair the accounting firm’s reputation as an auditor. They may negatively affect the Big Four, its clients, and client stakeholders. From the perspective of critical scholarship, it is vital to...

This study investigates the economic auditor-client dependency issue by examining the association between abnormal audit fee pricing and audit quality. Our study is the first to analyze this phenomenon empirically for the institutional setting of German IFRS firms by using a sample of 2,334...