The joint provision of audit and non-audit services by audit firms to their audit clients has posed a threat to auditor independence. To mitigate the independence problem, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a regulation (SEC 2003) that prohibits audit partners from...

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...

The security of both technical and trade credit factors becomes a serious bottleneck that affects the current development of e-business. Honest behavior is one of the important aspects of trade credit safety. It is a vital step to establish and maintain a safe credit system. In this paper, we...