Standards-based certification organizations (SBCOs) as a source of market order have been largely neglected as a topic of study by social scientists, particularly when compared to other sources of order such as the state and the market. This dissertation presents three papers that examine the...

We investigate the extent to which a client’s innovative effort affects the level of audit effort and whether the innovative-effort efficiency can attenuate the demand for greater audit effort associated with a client’s risky research-and-development (R&D) investments. We find that a client...

"Inspired by the Coase (1937) theory of the firm, we analyze the performance of Healy, Palepu, and Ruback (1992) sample of merged firms over a ten-year period using a managerially controlled efficiency measure, data envelopment analysis (DEA). Our individual, firm-level, year-by-year analyses...