This study investigates whether financial reporting quality is affected by an auditor's experience of litigation in the recent past. We find that the likelihood of an accounting misstatement and the magnitudes of misstatements are significantly lower for non-Big 4 auditors who recently suffered...

Empirical results presented in this paper indicate that large auditors are more accurate than small auditors. DeAngelo (1981) has argued that large auditors have more incentive to maintain a reputation for accurate auditing because an audit failure may lead to a loss of rents due to auditor...

If a company's auditor believes that the company is likely to enter bankruptcy, the auditor is required to warn investors by giving a 'qualified' audit report. This paper investigates whether auditor switching can help explain why auditors frequently fail to warn about impending bankruptcy. The...

Although theory suggests that companies would rationally select into audit even if it were not a legal requirement, many countries impose mandatory audits. This is arguably due to an audit having elements of a public good, which may result in not enough audits being purchased without regulatory...

We argue that auditors are more conservative when they face high estimation risk. To test this, we examine how auditors respond to the estimation risk associated with predicting the future bankruptcy outcomes of their audit clients. Consistent with auditors being more conservative when they face...

We hypothesize that companies in the same product market avoid sharing the same audit partner when they are concerned about possible information spillovers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that product market rivals are less likely to share the same partner when they perceive that...

Executives are 'affiliated' if they previously worked for their companies' audit firms. I find most affiliations (71.3%) occur when auditors become employees of audit clients ('employment affiliations'), but affiliations also arise when companies hire executives' former CPA firms ('alma mater...

There are competing arguments and mixed prior evidence on whether firms that are aggressive in their financial reporting exhibit more or less tax aggressiveness. Our research contributes to resolving this issue by examining the association between aggressive tax reporting and the incidence of...