We contribute to the literature on auditor’s task-specific expertise by examining the role of auditor experience in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), a complicated and increasingly prevalent corporate event that can give rise to misreporting. We find that in industries with more complex...

We examine the impact of a change in the audit industry structure in China as a result of two recent mergers involving large non-Big 4 audit firms. The ‘New Big’ audit firms, Ruihua and BDO Lixin, became the third and fourth largest audit firms in China following audit firm mergers,...

Prior research documents improvements in pre-acquisition outcomes when acquirer and target firms engage the same audit firm to perform their financial statement audits before the acquisition. In contrast to prior studies, we examine whether the advantages of engaging a common auditor prior to an...

We examine the impact of shared auditors, defined as audit firms that provide audit services to a target and its acquirer firm prior to an acquisition, on transaction outcomes. We find shared auditors are observed in nearly a quarter of all public acquisitions and targets are more likely to...

We study the effect of reverse mergers (RMs) on audit fees in China. Using a manually assembled data set from 2010-2019, we find that RMs pay higher audit fees than their IPO counterparts due to increased risks of corporate litigation and financial misstatement. RMs with performance commitments...