We investigate the role of accounting and audit quality in the allocation of international development aid loans provided by the World Bank. This aid is crucial to improve governance functions, infrastructure, and capital markets, and the accounting and audit environments in a country can...

We examine the impact of shared auditors, defined as audit firms that provide audit services to a target and its acquirer firm prior to an acquisition, on transaction outcomes. We find shared auditors are observed in nearly a quarter of all public acquisitions and targets are more likely to...

We examine auditors' disclosure benchmarking, which we define as auditors' acquisition of non-client financial statement information for the purpose of evaluating a client's financial statement information. Employing a novel dataset that captures auditors' access of non-client annual and...

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...

This study investigates the relation between audit regulation and the cost of equity capital. While a relation is intuitively appealing, there is a general lack of empirical evidence because changes in audit regulation are frequently accompanied by other major regulatory changes. We exploit...

Regulators have expressed concerns about the “revolving door” between auditors and clients, whereby audit employees move directly from audit firms to audit clients (i.e., “direct alumni hires”). Regulators are concerned that these direct hires could compromise audit quality, partly...

We document the emergence of the lead independent director (LID) board role in a sample of U.S. firms in 1999-2015. We find that firms that adopt a LID board role are larger and have more independent boards, higher institutional investor holdings, and an NYSE listing. Firms with greater...

Executive dismissal following low reporting quality events is well documented. However, prior research examines public signals of low reporting quality (e.g., restatements), which also have implications for the board’s own reputation due to the public nature of the signal. To investigate the...

Prior research documents positive effects of PCAOB oversight on reporting and audit quality. However, to gain a clear understanding of the net benefits of regulation, it is important to also investigate corresponding costs. To this end, we investigate the relation between PCAOB inspection...