This study examines factors that influenced public companies to retain or dismiss their audit firms as tax service providers during the years immediately surrounding the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002. We find a positive relation between a company's tax and operating complexity...

We examine the consequences of a 2010 Hong Kong regulation that allows, for the first time, companies incorporated in mainland China and cross-listed in Hong Kong (H share companies) to hire mainland domiciled auditors to audit their Hong Kong financial reports. We find that less than one third...

Objective - the timeliness of financial statement submission becomes important in decision making. With the growing importance of timely financial statements for the relevance of decision making, an understanding of the determinants of audit report lag becomes necessary. This research intends to...

This paper examines the antecedents of non-financial audit quality in the novel setting of sustainability assurance (SA). We proxy SA quality by a content analysis of the information disclosed in approximately 1,200 publicly available SA statements issued by a panel of G500 global firms in the...

In this paper we investigate whether auditors' decisions can be explained by accruals quality. Using alternative measures of accruals quality developed by prior researchers, we find that a firm with poorer accruals quality is associated with higher audit fees, a greater likelihood of receiving a...

This paper examines whether auditor independence is compromised resulting in poor quality audit when auditors provide substantial non-audit services to their clients. Prior studies have used abnormal discretionary accruals, financial restatements, the likelihood of issuing a qualified opinion,...

This study examines three research questions. First, did accrual reliability improve in the post-SOX period? Second, do companies receiving higher-quality audits report accruals that are more reliable? Third, did the degree of SOX-related improvement in accrual reliability vary across companies...

The unprecedented migration of Andersen's clients that followed Andersen's indictment in March 2002 potentially placed a large burden on successor auditors' audit resources. We refer to this strain, measured at the local-office level, as auditor capacity stress. We examine the effect of auditor...

Public auditors should reduce agency problems and improve transparency. We address the question of whether auditors should be elected by the citizens or appointed by either the legislature or the executive, and explore the influence of conducting performance audits. We construct a unique dataset...

This paper examines the association between audit-firm characteristics and audit-related litigation risk. Previous litigation risk studies have been limited to examining audit-client characteristics, as audit-firm data has generally been unavailable, or available only for a very small set of...