Under the assumption that audit quality relates positively to unobservable financial reporting reliability, we investigate whether audit quality is associated with the predictability of accounting earnings by focusing on analyst earnings forecast properties. The evidence shows that analysts'...

In this paper, we first develop a model in which national legal environments play a crucial role in determining auditor effort and audit fees. Our model predicts that: (1) audit fees increase monotonically with the strength or strictness of a country’s legal liability regime; (2) given a legal...

Following large-scale auditor consolidations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with Arthur Andersen's collapse in 2001, the global audit market has become highly concentrated during the past 30 years. Many interested parties, including regulators, researchers, and practitioners, disagree...