Conventional wisdom holds that joint audits would improve audit quality by enhancing audit evidence precision, because “Two heads are better than one,” and by enhancing auditor independence, because it is more expensive for a company to “bribe” two audit firms than one. Our paper...

To restore investors' confidence in the reliability of corporate financial disclosures, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 mandated stricter regulations and arguably increased auditors' liability. In this paper, we analyze the effects of increased auditor liability on the audit failure rate, the...

Conventional wisdom suggests that audit risk disclosure improves the quality of audited financial reports because the disclosure reduces information asymmetry between investors and companies. In contrast, we show that audit risk disclosure provides companies with another channel to influence...

Conventional wisdom suggests that audit risk disclosure improves the overall efficiency because investors are more informed of a client's financial performance. This view, while intuitive, ignores a potential externality of audit risk disclosure on auditor competence. We consider a two-period...

Conventional wisdom suggests that partner identification disclosure can improve audit quality, because it may enhance transparency and individual accountability. Building on a two-period assignment model, we show that under certain conditions, the disclosure can distort partner client assignment...