I use a sample of 409 companies that restate their earnings in 1997-2001 to examine penalties for outside directors, particularly audit committee members, when their companies experience accounting restatements. Penalties from lawsuits and Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) actions are...

We examine the influence of auditors on mitigating corporate fraud in China, which is known to have weak legal enforcement, weak investor protection along with tight control of the media and labour unions. We find that firms with executives that have lower integrity, indicated by a greater...

This paper examines the extent to which the audit and corporate governance characteristics of UK private companies are associated with defective accounting information. Despite the economic importance of private firms, relatively little is known about their financial reporting and governance...

We examine the influence of auditors on corporate fraud in China. We find lower executive integrity firms are associated with higher propensity of regulatory enforcement actions against corporate fraud in the subsequent year. We then show that this effect is moderated by the issuance of modified...

Regulators do not prohibit auditors from providing tax services to their audit clients, provided these services are preapproved by audit committees. I examine whether the association between auditor-provided tax services and earnings management in tax expense varies with audit committee...

International and U.S. accounting and auditing standard setters have focused considerable attention and rule making around group audits and in particular the reporting quality of subsidiary entities. We examine how membership in a consolidated group and the related group audit affects the...

In this paper we provide evidence for the effects of social norms on audit pricing by studying companies belonging to the alcohol, firearms, gambling, military, nuclear power, and tobacco industries, which are often described as “sin” companies. We hypothesize that the disparities between...

This study examines how short-selling threats affect auditors. During 2005-2007, the SEC ordered a pilot program in which one-third of the Russell 3000 index firms were arbitrarily chosen to be exempted from short-sale price tests. As a result, these stocks faced significantly higher...

We investigate the association between audit partner industry specialization and future stock price crash risk. Although research on audit partners has been growing, we are not aware of any prior studies that investigate partner-level specialization and crash risk. Using a large sample of...

This paper studies whether and how Big-4 firms provide higher quality audits than non-Big-4 firms. Specifically, we first examine a Big-4 effect and then explore three sources of the Big-4 effect. To test the Big-4 effect, we use a unique dataset of individual audit partners for a large sample...