Focusing on the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998, we document increased audit quality (measured … by earnings quality of the clients) for the merged firm and other big-X auditors 1 during the post-merger period because … and 2) the value relevance of earnings has significantly increased. Furthermore, we find evidence that in the post-merger …

to mergers broadly, and to study several audit market dynamics. Unlike most merger settings that primarily allow … that the number of clients switching to the acquiring auditor increases following the merger, however we find that this is … evidence that the merger generates a sustained gain in market share or significant increase in aggregate fees. Our study is …

means of a stochastic frontier approach, then we try to explain the estimated BCCs' cost efficiency with a set of merger … Cooperativo, BCCs) and try to assess whether those mergers were efficiency-enhancing. For the purpose, we employ a two …-step procedure: we first estimate bank-level cost efficiency scores for a large sample of Italian banks in the period 1993-2013 by …