The Big 4 have acquired numerous consulting firms since the late 2000s, and regulators are concerned that a focus on consulting practices could negatively affect audit quality through audit firm culture. Audit firms counter by arguing that expertise gained through consulting can improve...

We investigate whether non-audit service (NAS) purchases are correlated among audit committee (AC) interlocked firms. We then examine whether financial reporting quality and future firm performance vary with the amount of correlated NAS purchases from the AC interlock. We find that firms in the...

The era of globalization has stimulated the spirit of competition of companies in an ever-intensifying business race of various sectors. In an attempt to sustain the life of the company, earnings figures are kept positive to attract investors and to elevate the company's social status. This...

This study explores two potential safeguards against liability when auditors exercise professional skepticism, but do not detect a fraud: (1) a firm policy requiring a specific level of professional skepticism in high-risk audit areas and (2) providing jurors with key differences between the...

This paper examines how the relative timing affects the quality of financial reports in a staggered reporting system. We show that the audit quality of the leader firm exceeds that of the lagger. Investment efficiency also differs systematically across firms depending on the relative reporting...

Recent research challenges the notion that the Big 4 auditors provide a higher quality audit relative to non-Big 4 and suggests that the Big N effect could be due to self-selection. We contribute to this debate by controlling for pre-audit earnings quality, an important omitted variable in prior...

Many legal jurisdictions, including the U.S. and U.K., have passed regulations to address the potential negative impacts of a lack of competition and high concentration in public company audit markets. One consequence of increased regulations, desired or not, is that they have presumably...

We hypothesize that companies in the same product market avoid sharing the same audit partner when they are concerned about possible information spillovers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that product market rivals are less likely to share the same partner when they perceive that...

This paper examines whether the changes in audit rotation policy affect the relationship between audit firm rotation and audit quality in Indonesia. This study uses 2,403 observations from 371 firms listed on the IDX for the period 2010–2017. This study uses Ordinary Least Squares regression...

Using detailed data for fieldwork hours and audit hours by rank from audit engagements in Korea, we examine whether audits conducted under workload imbalance, proxied by busy-season audits, impair audit quality, and how auditors adjust staff assignments for busy-season audits. We generally find...