We examine the relationship between returnee chief executive officers (CEOs) and audit fees in China using robust econometric modeling with 25,630 firm-year observations between 2008 and 2020. A returnee CEO is a Chinese CEO who has previously worked or studied outside mainland China. Consistent...

This study examines the mean difference and the indirect relationship between earnings management (measured by discretionary accruals) and audit fees. It spans the period from 2005 to 2020 for four countries in two pairs, namely Italy and Spain, and Germany and France. The investigation...

The economic literature documents that the investment rate in intangible assets, including intellectual property (IP), has far outpaced that of tangible assets for several decades. In this context, our research delves into the impact of self-created intangible assets on the auditor's risk...

We select a machine learning model to identify audit opinion shopping and analyze the factors driving the model. To this end, we use six models, namely random forest, gradient boosting decision tree, random undersampling boosting, logistic regression (LR), support vector machine and multilayer...

This study investigates the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance on the cost of capital, using a sample of 406 non-financial companies in the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2023. We examined how ESG performance and audit quality influence the cost of equity (CoE), cost...

This research contributes to understanding the spillover effect of customer digital transformation along the supply chain. We take a supply chain relationship perspective to explore the influence of customers' digital transformation on suppliers' audit fees and find a significant reduction in...

This study investigates whether the presence of rookie independent directors (rookie IDs) is associated with audit fees and finds a positive association. Moreover, the positive effect of rookie IDs on audit fees is accentuated for firms whose rookie IDs have no academic background, are appointed...

Big Four accounting firms increasingly focus on non-audit services. Failures in these services may impair the accounting firm’s reputation as an auditor. They may negatively affect the Big Four, its clients, and client stakeholders. From the perspective of critical scholarship, it is vital to...

The primary objective of this research was to investigate the potential moderating role of audit fees in the relationship between audit committee characteristics and earnings management. Specifically, this study aimed to establish connections between audit committee features, such as committee...

Purpose This study explores how auditors' emotions, specifically negative moods triggered by flight delays, impact auditing quality. Design/methodology/approach Utilizing flight delays during audit assignments as a mood indicator, weather conditions at departure airports serve as an instrumental...

Using a sample of U.S. firms from 2003 to 2018, we examine the effect of an audit client’s code of ethics quality on audit fees. We find that clients with a lower code of ethics quality pay significantly higher audit fees, suggesting that auditors perceive such clients as riskier and charge...

We investigate the association of location-specific severity of the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic (COVID) with changes in audit fees and delays following the pandemic’s onset. Employing data on lengths of stay-at-home (S@H) mandates to proxy for COVID’s disrupting effects on audits, we find that...