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...

Increased audit regulation, coupled with practitioner reports of “hyper-acquisitive” behavior among smaller firms, creates a dynamic environment in which to assess changes in the U.S. audit market. Against this backdrop, we examine the consequences of small audit firm mergers on audit...

Concerns regarding a lack of competition in the market for public-company audits focus on Big Four audit firms. Little concern has been raised regarding Non-Big Four firms, yet we know little about competition and barriers to entry in this market. Prior studies only consider competition from...

Regulators are not always able to anticipate how mandates will translate to financial reporting practice, particularly when managers are able to exercise reporting discretion. When XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language, was mandated by the SEC, financial analysts were among the...

We report insights about ICFR-related challenges and practices at large U.S. public companies from survey responses of 145 accounting executives and interviews of 16 accounting executives. Executives view controls around non-routine transactions, income tax provisions, and access to data as...

This paper analyzes the auditor choices for a sample of 2,333 predominantly small and mid-sized Finnish firms. Finland requires virtually all commercial enterprises to have a financial statement audit, but allows the smallest firms to choose from four types of audit firms: first tier...

We use hand-collected data to analyze submission-to-acceptance (STA) times in the top-tier accounting journals relative to other top-tier business journals from 1993 through 2021. We find that, vis-à-vis other business disciplines, STA times at top-tier accounting journals were shorter in the...