We present the first large-sample empirical evidence on U.S. auditors' responses to changes in entity-level audit risk during 2006-2007, the period leading-up to the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Treating fiscal year 2005 engagements as a pre-crisis benchmark, we find that audit attention...

A restatement occurs when a previously issued financial statement contains a misstatement and this misstatement is detected and corrected. Higher audit quality lowers restatement probability by reducing misstatements, but it increases restatement probability by increasing the probability that...

Several reforms of the Sarbanes Oxley Act were designed to strengthen the vigilance exercised by audit committee members in their oversight of independent financial-statement audits of U.S. public companies. After SOX, a shift occurred in the audit committee labor market such that more...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>The replacement of Auditing Standard No. 2 (AS2) by Auditing Standard No. 5 (AS5) creates a natural experiment that sheds light on (1) potential inefficiencies caused by regulatory responses to a political crisis and (2) audit efficiency and effectiveness improvements resulting from the...

We argue that conflicting estimates of auditors' industry leadership premia documented in prior research reflect model misspecification. We show that leadership measures can be expected to identify different auditors as leaders depending on the basis (assets, fees or auditee counts) used to...