In recent years, policy makers have expressed concern about the risks posed by audit market concentration (i.e., high market shares for the dominant Big 4 audit firms) for audit quality. In this paper, we examine the relation between concentration at the local (i.e., metropolitan statistical...

In this paper, we examine audit quality for Big 4 and Second-tier auditors during 2003-06. We utilize the auditor's propensity to issue a going concern audit report for distressed clients as a measure of audit quality. In addition, since the purpose of an audit is to improve financial reporting...

Both the GAO (2003, 2008) and the US Treasury (2008) have implied that the Big 4 dominated US audit market lacks competition. More recently, the PCAOB has expressed a somewhat different concern, i.e., that because audit committees may be primarily interested in negotiating a lower audit fee...