Using detailed data for fieldwork hours and audit hours by rank from audit engagements in Korea, we examine whether audits conducted under workload imbalance, proxied by busy-season audits, impair audit quality, and how auditors adjust staff assignments for busy-season audits. We generally find...

This research investigates the effect on audit quality of concentrated public company financial statement filing deadlines in audit offices. Audit offices must effectively manage their resources to meet their clients' audit service demands. For audit offices with clients that have filing...

This study examines the effects of audit partner tenure and audit partner changes on internal control reporting quality for large U.S. not-for-profit (NFP) organizations. Regulators contend that audit partners lose their objectivity over successive audits, reducing audit quality. A large body of...

This study examines the effects of audit partner tenure and audit partner changes on internal control reporting quality for large U.S. not-for-profit (NFP) organizations. Regulators contend that audit partners lose their objectivity over successive audits, reducing audit quality. A large body of...

We conduct two experiments using experienced audit partners as participants to investigate whether engagement partners’ involvement in the client acquisition process as the contact partner can influence their subsequent audit judgments, and whether the engagement quality review partner’s...

Using a comprehensive sample of audits for public companies in China, we demonstrate whether and how bad audit behavior spreads among individual auditors (i.e., CPAs). CPAs are deemed to be “diseased” during the period when their audits fail, and are subsequently sanctioned by the...

One of the key reforms aimed at improving audit quality has been the introduction of public oversight over the auditing profession by national public oversight bodies (POBs). The foundation of their strategy is inspections of audit firms. However, little is known about the impact of inspections...

We examine the impact of data analytics on audit quality. Using hand-collected information on data analytics skills of employees of audit firms, we find that human capital investment in data analytics improves audit quality. The analytics capability of both frontline and back-office employees...

We use data from China to examine whether regulations that limit management influence over auditors improve audit quality. China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) issued two rules in 2004 aimed at improving audit quality for state-owned...

We examine the association between country-level government quality and firms' choice of external auditors. Using a cross-sectional sample of 142,193 firm-year observations from 46 countries over 1998-2007, we show that the government quality of a country has a significant positive effect on the...