Using a dataset of 107 internal auditors, we investigate internal audit functions' (IAF) role in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) matters. We give evidence for organizations' and IAFs' ESG maturity driving ESG reporting, while IAFs' involvement in ESG drives assurance of ESG reports....

In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This paper reports on a two-year field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market...

Ensuring compliance of sustainability reports, especially Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting, with the EU Taxonomy is essential in the European Union. In parallel, a significant transformation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be observed, shifting from task-specific models...

We examined the nexus between four internal audit functions (IAF) and sustainability audits (SA) of manufacturing firms. The specific IAF employed in this study were; risk management practices (RMP), sustainability sensitivity (SS), internal audit effectiveness (IAE) and enactments, policies,...

As corporate ESG disclosures continue to grow in prominence and regulators begin to require attestation over ESG information, understanding the factors that influence ESG materiality assessments can help auditors provide more effective assurance over ESG information. We use an experiment to...

This study examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on auditor switch decisions among Chinese listed firms. I document a downward auditor switch pattern of Chinese firms during heightened periods of EPU, and this behaviour is attributed to uncompromising audit fees and lowered...

We study regulation of the auditing profession in a model where audit quality is unobservable and enforcing regulation is costly. The optimal audit standard falls short of the first-best audit quality, and is increasing in the riskiness of firms and in the amount of funding they seek. The model...

We investigate the strategic decision making of audit firms in a tendering process. In particular, we are interested in how audit firms behave to acquire audit clients and which audit quality is ensured. Our main findings are manifold. First, if two big audit firms are competing, we do not...