We revisit the notion of audit quality and investigate how audit quality is related to auditor size and the structure of the auditing industry. We discuss a model of audit firm competition where both audit quality and audit firm size are endogenous. Based on this model, we predict how certain...

Building on an auction model, we examine the economic consequences of audit retendering, under which the incumbent auditor in auction possesses both an information advantage and knowledge advantage over outside auditors. Audit retendering allows the firm to retain the incumbent auditor with...

Conventional wisdom holds that joint audits would improve audit quality by enhancing audit evidence precision, because “Two heads are better than one,” and by enhancing auditor independence, because it is more expensive for a company to “bribe” two audit firms than one. Our paper...

The extant auditing literature documents an inconsistent relationship between audit fees and market concentration. In this paper, we argue that the impact of market concentration on audit fees is auditor and auditee specific. Based on the fact that the audit services to an auditee are generally...