Acquirers are motivated to overstate earnings prior to stock-financed acquisitions. We hypothesize that audits help to detect and correct such overstatements. We test this using a difference-in-differences design, which compares audit adjustments to earnings for stock-financed and cash-financed...

Listed companies commonly appoint their incumbent annual auditors to audit a target company during a merger and acquisition (M&A). However, some companies choose an alternative auditor to perform the M&A audit. To understand the consequences of this apparently unconventional auditor choice, we...