This study examines the role of the local auditor office in the comparability and quality of their clients' earnings. I construct of sample of firm-pairs in which each observation consists of two firms in the same industry-year. Accounting comparability is inferred by the closeness of total...

KPMG is one of the leading audit and accounting firms globally - the Big Four. Due to the recent regulations and the increasing globalization, the Big Four are required to differentiate. The literature review shows that the largest accounting firms are reasonably similar in terms of operations,...

The aim of this study was to investigate two aspects of accounting information that may be inherently related: income smoothing practices and conditional conservatism. Theoretically, the more a firm employs income smoothing, i.e., uses accruals to reduce the variability of profits, the less...

We study dividend payments and earnings management in railway companies in the first decades of the 20th century. We argue that the historical organization of the Spanish railway industry as a complex net of 99-year concessionary contracts created predictable incentives for earnings management...

This study examines whether the provision of non-audit services by a firm's own auditors provides value to the firm. We examine the future return on assets and sales growth as a function of the expenditures by the client firms on non-audit services, reasoning that if such payments are intended...

This paper presents evidence on audit market concentration and auditor fee levels in the UK market in the crucial period of structural change following the PricewaterhouseCoopers' (PwC) merger and encompassing Andersen's demise (1998-2003). Given the current interest in auditor choice, analysis...

I provide evidence on the effects of financial audit mandates in the charitable sector, in particular their influence on donor behavior. My empirical strategy relies on variation in size-based exemption thresholds across states and differences in size driven by the nature of charities’...

For much of the past decade, the audit profession has been enjoined to enter new and novel fields of assurance services. This call implies the importation of constructs from traditional attest financial audits into new domains to provide elevated levels of assurance for information-users and...

The pricing of Big 4 industry leadership is examined for a sample of U.K. publicly-listed companies, and adds to the evidence from the Australian and U.S. audit markets that city-specific industry leadership commands a fee premium. There is a significant fee premium for city-specific industry...

If a company's auditor believes that the company is likely to enter bankruptcy, the auditor is required to warn investors by giving a 'equalified' audit report. This paper investigates whether managers use auditor switching to prevent auditors from giving qualified reports ('opinion-shopping')....