We argue that conflicting estimates of auditors' industry leadership premia documented in prior research reflect model misspecification. We show that leadership measures can be expected to identify different auditors as leaders depending on the basis (assets, fees or auditee counts) used to...

The duration and magnitude of the private economic benefits obtained from firm-level R&D outlays are important to managers, investors and policy-makers. We present a modeling and estimation approach that facilitates reliable estimation of these benefits under mild a priori assumptions. Our...

We present the first large-sample empirical evidence on U.S. auditors' responses to changes in entity-level audit risk during 2006-2007, the period leading-up to the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Treating fiscal year 2005 engagements as a pre-crisis benchmark, we find that audit attention...

We study what a simulated market of pure price competition reveals about market shares and per-partner profits in Big Six audit firm mergers for 1997. In the model of audit production we use, leverage (staff-to-partner ratio) reflects the productivity of an audit partner and is key to analyzing...

We investigate whether the financial riskiness of large US audit firm clienteles varied with the changing audit litigation liability environment during the period 1975-1999. Partitioning the period of study into four distinct periods [a benchmark period (1975-1984), a period of increasing...