Researchers have tested a wide array of theories and developed a broad set of explanatory variables for audit quality. However, little is known about which of these audit-related variables are the most predictive of audit failure (i.e., low-quality audits). We devote this study to provide...

This study develops machine learning models to predict audit quality by using a wide range of data describing detailed characteristics of accounting firms, individual audit partners, and public companies in China. It constructs the surprise score, a new measure of audit quality, calculated as...