We conduct a post-implementation research analysis of AS4, a standard guiding voluntary audits of material weakness (MW) remediation disclosures, to understand the reasons for the scarcity of AS4 audits in practice. We use multiple methods (experiments, comment letter analysis, and surveys) to...

Auditing standards task auditors with collecting sufficient appropriate evidence to form audit judgments. Yet cognitive psychology documents a robust finding in which people evaluate a bundle of relevant, directionally consistent evidence as though averaging the strength of the components. In...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sanctioned investor-paid rating agency Egan-Jones for falsely stating that it did not know its clients' investment positions. The SEC's action against Egan-Jones raises the broad question whether knowledge of clients' investment positions creates a...

Prior research has shown that auditors who learn superiors' views before making their own judgment are influenced by them (e.g., Peecher 1996; Tan et al. 1997; Cohen and Trompeter 1998; Brown et al. 1999; Wilks 2002). We use the theory of motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990, 1999) to examine the malleability of...

National office consultations (NOCs) are a mechanism intended to enhance audit quality, consistent with the logic of professionalism inherent in the audit profession. Yet research indicates that the competing logic of commercialism has become institutionalized in audit firms. We examine how the...

There is a dearth of business ethics research on family firms, despite the importance of such firms to the U.S. economy (Vazquez 2016). We answer Vazquez's (2016) call to examine the intersection of family firms research and business ethics, by investigating whether external auditors assess...

This study examines how emphasis framing in narrative disclosures, and the investor characteristics numeracy and persuadability, affect investors' ability to discriminate between firms' better and worse financial performance. In an experiment with 264 participants from the general population, we...

The study examines the joint effects of two different types of state skepticism prompts, as well as the effect of the personality trait of professional skepticism, on auditor cognitive performance in a hypothesis-testing task. Seventy-eight audit students and 85 practicing auditors examine an...

National office consultations (NOCs) are a mechanism intended to enhance audit quality, consistent with the logic of professionalism inherent in the audit profession. Yet, research indicates that the competing logic of commercialism has become institutionalized in audit firms. We examine how the...

With the movement towards adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) worldwide, a question arises as to whether the adoption of a principles-based approach such as IFRS will ultimately result in higher quality financial reporting. This issue is particularly relevant because,...