A company officer is an "alumnus" if he previously worked for an audit firm. Iyer et al. (1997) find alumni have ties with their former audit firms and alumni are more inclined to provide economic benefits to former firms if they have stronger ties. If the alumnus is a senior corporate officer,...

We find no evidence that non-audit service fees impair auditor independence, where independence is surrogated by auditors' propensity to issue going concern audit opinions. We do find, however, that auditors are more likely to issue going concern opinions to clients paying higher audit fees,...

A large auditing literature concludes that Big N auditors provide higher audit quality than non-Big N auditors. Recently, however, a high profile study suggests that Propensity Score Matching (PSM) on client characteristics eliminates the Big N effect (Lawrence, Minutti-Meza, and Zhang 2011,...

We find that non-Big 4 audit offices with greater awareness of SEC enforcement are more likely to issue first-time going concern reports to distressed clients; where SEC “awareness” is measured using (1) audit office proximity to SEC regional offices, and (2) proximity to specific SEC...

Existing research on opinion shopping focuses primarily on managers' attempts to switch auditors in order to avoid the receipt of an unfavorable audit opinion. We extend this literature by examining whether managers successfully shop for auditors who will allow questionable accounting practices,...