We examine two audit attributes that may contribute to a successful initial public offering (IPO). We define success as an IPO firm that reaches the capital markets. We find that the existence of a high quality (Big 5) auditor and the absence of a going concern audit report are positively...

The majority of audit litigation research has focused on juror judgments. We examine how jurors' negligence judgments and attorneys' out-of-court settlements are differently impacted by two features of a materially misstated accounting estimate — the amount of estimate uncertainty and whether...

Initial public offering (IPO) companies are exempt from Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, leaving investors to assess the quality of an IPO company's internal controls, which affect the quality of management-provided financial information, without an opinion on internal controls...

The Securities Act of 1933 governs the going public process and the accompanying registration statement submissions to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups (JOBS) Act of 2012 created several accommodations under the SEC securities laws for a new...

This paper attempts to analyse the information content of a qualified audit opinion on the pricing of an IPO. To minimise the effect of selection bias, we match the sample of IPOs with an audit opinion and without, based on their propensity scores. Based on classical underpricing, firms with...

This paper examines how accounting audits impact investment decisions in the presence of agency conflicts. Investors choose between a short-term risk-free asset and a long-term risky project. The manager in charge of the latter has incentives to inflate interim payoffs to be able to continue a...

This study examines whether boards of directors use external auditing to protect their reputation capital. We hypothesize and find that audit quality increases with the level of directors' reputation capital. More specifically, using ten-year panel data on Finnish listed companies, we find that...

This paper studies the effect of losses due to audit error on audit quality when the auditor's report of earnings is used for managerial compensation and the auditor can learn about the firm's productivity environment by observing the manager's effort. If the auditor observes the manager's...

In the debate over contractual freedom or enabling-versus-mandatory rules in fiduciary law, those who do not adhere to an unbridled contractatian approach tend to justify fiduciary law's strict posture by appealing to transaction cost reasoning. In this view, fiduciary law more efficiently sets...