This paper investigates whether the provision of non-audit services (NAS) to audit clients impairs auditor independence of mind and independence in appearance. The main contributions of this paper are in terms of its timeliness with respect to regulatory changes, the simultaneous examination of...

Conventional wisdom holds that joint audits would improve audit quality by enhancing audit evidence precision, because “Two heads are better than one,” and by enhancing auditor independence, because it is more expensive for a company to “bribe” two audit firms than one. Our paper...

We investigate whether Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspections affect the quality of internal control audits. Our research design improves on prior studies by exploiting both cross-sectional and time-series variation in the content of PCAOB inspection reports, while also...

One of the key reforms aimed at improving audit quality has been the introduction of public oversight over the auditing profession by national public oversight bodies (POBs). The foundation of their strategy is inspections of audit firms. However, little is known about the impact of inspections...

This study aims to examine the effect of corporate governance mechanisms on audit reporting. Whereas the specific purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the number of audit committees, the role of independent (non-executive) board members, institutional ownership, and ownership...

We examine the effects of the 1998 merger of Price Waterhouse (PW) and Coopers & Lybrand (CL) on the audit quality of the merged firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) at both the firm- and office-levels, where audit quality is surrogated by the auditor's propensity to issue a going concern opinion,...

Using a sample of firms from France, where the law requires the use of two auditors, we study the effect of auditor pair composition on audit quality by examining a specific account, goodwill impairment. We document that firms audited by a Big 4-non-Big 4 auditor pair (BS) are more likely to...

We insert an automated high-quality (HQ) auditor into established experimental audit markets to test the impact on the supply and demand for audit quality. Our approach allows us to investigate manager demand for audit quality and how other auditors respond to the increased competition from the...

We investigate the impact of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) first-time inspections of foreign accounting firms by examining abnormal accruals around the inspection year, and the value relevance of accounting numbers around the inspection report date, for their U.S....

I develop a framework that provides new insights into the consequences of the provision of non-audit services (NAS) by audit firms to audit clients. The investors of a client firm may optimally let the auditor provide NAS because of an incentive effect. Indeed, the possibility of providing NAS...