We analyze audit fees and audit risk to extract auditor's assessment of family firms' financial reporting quality. Relative to non-family firms, we find that auditors charge significantly less from family firms and the fee difference shrinks in magnitude when family firms have high audit risk....

Prior studies provide conflicting evidence on the reporting/disclosure quality of family firms. We provide unique insights by analyzing the pricing of audit engagements. Because financial reporting quality affects audit risk, which determines how auditors price engagements, we analyze audit fees...

We investigate whether companies strategically change accounting estimates to manipulate earnings, as some claim (“opportunism” hypothesis), or whether these modifications represent changes in the underlying fundamentals of financially troubled or risky companies updating their priors about...

According to accounting and auditing standards, external auditors and management must both independently monitor goodwill balance for any impairment. Therefore, goodwill impairment may contain valuable incremental information about the CEO's ability which the board can utilize for CEO retention...

We study the effects of accounting losses on CEO turnover. If accounting losses provide incremental information about managerial ability, boards can utilize the information in losses to assess CEO's stewardship of assets, which is why losses may serve as a heuristic for managerial failure. We...