The purpose of this paper is to predict the association between the effect of start-up cost and audit opinion shopping on the pricing strategies of medium-sized audit firms. Using a sample of 753 local –office-year observations between 2006 and 2011, we find evidence of a positive association...

The critical global role of audit firms, combined with the scarcity of qualified staff and downward pressure on fees, has increased the importance of understanding efficiency in this industry. This paper examines the technical and allocative inefficiencies of audit firm staffing using data from...

What are the implications of major customer dependency, i.e., the degree of a supplier firm's dependency on its major customers, for external auditors? While the conventional view emphasizes the negatives of major customer dependency for client business risk, we find that suppliers with more...

This study divides the audit market into the oligopolistic and atomistic segments at MSA level and examine whether the effect of audit market concentration on audit fees and audit quality is the same in these two segments. I find that the market concentration raises the audit fees in the...

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...