We examine the impact of informal cultural attributes, such as generalized trust and civic cooperation in a society, on the presence of Big N auditors and audit fees in country-specific audit markets. On one hand, because societies with higher trust and civic cooperation are associated with low...

Audit pricing, along with its determinants, forms one of the most extensively investigated areas in audit research. Recent years have seen increasing interest in the macro-level determinants of audit fees related to differences in audit environments around the world. To answer the resultant call...

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...

Although researchers commonly acknowledge that public-company audits should add value by improving the precision of financial information via reduced estimation errors, prior literature correctly notes that there is little direct archival evidence to support this assertion. Moreover, regulatory...

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of enforcement (greater monitoring of auditors and more regulatory scrutiny of financial reporting) on accounting quality under IFRS using measures of earnings smoothing, managing towards earnings targets, timely loss recognition and value...

Using income smoothing and its two components – the informational component and the garbled component – we examine whether and how the time-oriented tendency embedded in languages influences corporate financial reporting decisions. Separating languages into weak- versus strong- future time...

This paper investigates the role of technical reserves in the income smoothing behavior of insurance companies. This is one of the first attempts in the literature to trace such relationship in the insurance industry, especially at a multi-country setting. The experience of 770 insurance firms...

We study whether a particular aspect of language structure, the future-time reference (FTR) of a language, explains variation in corporate earnings management behaviors around the world. Based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Whorf 1956), we predict that grammatically referencing the future, which...

The controversy about the choice among accounting alternatives is often based on arguments suggesting heuristic behaviour by market participants and firm managers. Debates focus on whether accounting methodology systematically alters reported earnings and whether this effect may add or subtract...