Audits by private, third-party auditors are frequently mandated to ensure compliance with regulations (e.g., accounting or environmental standards). We examine how such mandates shape the market for audits. In our empirical examination, we focus on one of the oldest and most prominent audit...

We propose a new audit supplier competition construct: the Office-Client Balance (OCB), which consists of the relative abundance of suppliers (competing audit offices) and customers (audit clients) in a metropolitan (metro) area. From this construct, we derive a metro-level audit competition...

This paper studies the impact of public audit oversight on financial reporting credibility. We analyze changes in market responses to earnings news after public audit oversight is introduced, exploiting that the regime onset depends on fiscal-year ends, auditors, and the roll-out of auditor...

This paper investigates the common, yet previously opaque, practice of using foreign audit firms (component auditors) to conduct portions of audit work for U.S. public companies. U.S. regulators have expressed concern for the transparency and quality of audits using component auditors. Employing...

The mandatory retirement age within U.S. audit firms ranges from 55 to 62, which has resulted in both controversy and legal scrutiny. The potential cost of requiring partners to retire at an age that is far younger than in other countries and related professions is the loss of their connections,...

Changes to the auditor's report have been proposed and issued internationally to provide more relevant information to users and enhance the perceived value of financial statement audits. This study investigates the impact of audit reporting changes on audit quality and audit fees in the New...

We investigate the impact of the initiations of national audit inspection programs on firm-specific stock crash risk in 38 countries worldwide. The staggered commencement of the inspection regimes in different countries allows us to identify the causal effect of audit quality on crash risk. We...

Auditing failures and scandals have become commonplace. In response, reformers (including the Kingman Review in the U.K and a recent report of the U.K.'s Competition and Market Authority) have proposed a variety of remedies, including prophylactic bans on auditors providing consulting services...

In March 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Most European governments reacted with lockdowns. A drop in demand as well as supply disruptions affected the economy which also hit European banks with quite a lot of uncertainty, not only regarding possible...