This study examines how auditors' reputational damage caused by litigation affects audit clients' borrowing costs. Focusing on a sample of syndicated loans made to non-litigated borrowers, we find that borrowing costs are higher when the firms' auditors are sued for alleged audit failures....

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...