Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understand the role of the statutory auditing profession in France. The study is theoretically based on distinctions between a functionalist view of professions and a neo-weberian view. Prior research, conducted in Anglo-American...

This study examines whether auditors are employed as a monitoring mechanism to mitigate agency problems arising from different types of controlling shareholders. In a context of concentrated ownership and poor investor protection, controlling shareholders can easily expropriate wealth from...

In this study the authors analyze the factors associated with the publication of an English-language annual report in non-English-speaking countries. Using a sample of 3,994 firms from 27 countries in 2003, they find that about 50% of the sample firms issue annual reports in English. Our...

L'auditeur (en France, le commissaire aux comptes) a pour mission le contrôle des états financiers de l'entreprise auditée. La qualité de son travail dépend de sa compétence et de sa dépendance (De Angelo, 1981). Cependant la plupart des travaux traitent de l'indépendance. De plus, la...

We investigate the economic consequences of additional disclosure about assets with no active market in terms of liquidity, perception of information reliability and relevance. We use an experimental design: 181 MBA students are asked to value 24 investments. We manipulate the level of...

Minority expropriation could result when controlling shareholders can expropriate minority shareholders and profit from private benefits of control. This agency conflict (named Type II) has been rarely studied, as the most commonly assumed agency conflict resides between managers and...

There is a constant questioning about the interest of introducing the joint audit. Very recently, the European Commission has raised this topic in its Green Paper, arguing that it may be a way to increase audit quality after the financial crisis and to mitigate audit market concentration, by...

This paper studies the claimed costs and benefits of joint audit that has recently been suggested by the European Commission (EC 2011) as a way to increase the market efficiency. This initiative has raised a vivid debate between the Big and the 2nd Tier audit firms. While both claim acting on...