The increase in disclosure about the persons conducting audits has led to a steep rise in research examining the role that individual audit partners play in audit outcomes. Although recent evidence suggests that individual audit partners explain a substantial portion of the variation in audit...

This study investigates auditors’ reputational damage following unfavorable PCAOB inspection reports. While prior studies reach different conclusions on the usefulness of PCAOB reports based on subsequent changes in auditors’ market share (or lack thereof), we posit that a client’s...

Although recent evidence suggests that individual audit partners explain a substantial portion of thevariation in audit quality proxies, much less is known about what determines an audit partner’s quality. Psychology and behavioral economics theories hold that an individual’s experiences can...

This paper investigates how auditors respond to shareholder activism against their clients. We find that activism targets pay higher audit fees and also are more likely to receive adverse internal control opinions and first-time going concern opinions. Our results suggest that the increased...

We examine whether the readability of financial statement footnotes in the annual report is informative about audit engagement risk. Using various readability measures, we predict and find that firms with less readable footnotes have longer audit report lag, incur higher audit fees, and are more...

This study investigates whether auditors' independence was compromised by client audit fee pressures during the recession of December 2007 through June 2009. We hypothesize that clients able to extract fee concessions from auditors during the recession, when audit risk increased, might also have...