Major accounting scandals and audit failures (such as Enron and WorldCom) during the turn of the century seriously impaired the public’s confidence and trust in audited financial statements. This had cast a shadow on auditor independence, integrity and professional conduct, and led to the...

With the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), audit firm oversight shifted away from self-regulation to independent regulation. The inspections program is the central feature of the PCAOB. We examine whether PCAOB inspections are able to distinguish actual audit...

In this paper we investigate whether auditors' decisions can be explained by accruals quality. Using alternative measures of accruals quality developed by prior researchers, we find that a firm with poorer accruals quality is associated with higher audit fees, a greater likelihood of receiving a...

This study examines three research questions. First, did accrual reliability improve in the post-SOX period? Second, do companies receiving higher-quality audits report accruals that are more reliable? Third, did the degree of SOX-related improvement in accrual reliability vary across companies...

We investigate whether auditor independence is compromised by either the mix of audit and non audit services (NAS), or simply unusually large NAS or audit fees. The results help reconcile apparently conflicting evidence in prior studies linking NAS and indicators of earnings management, as well...

Under the assumption that audit quality relates positively to unobservable financial reporting reliability, we investigate whether audit quality is associated with the predictability of accounting earnings by focusing on analyst earnings forecast properties. The evidence shows that analysts'...

The association of a country's investor protection regime with the quality of reported earnings is examined for a large sample of firms from 42 countries. Three attributes of earnings are evaluated: the magnitude of the association of a country's investor protection regime with the quality of...

We conduct a meta-analysis of the association between audit committee (AC) independence and financial reporting quality (FRQ). Although we cannot reliably aggregate results across studies in a statistical sense because of inconsistencies in defining FRQ and the absence of replication studies,...

We examine whether firms with managers that have prior internal audit experience are less likely to manage earnings. We find that firms with managers that have internal audit experience are associated with less overall earnings management, driven by lower real earnings management. Importantly,...