The last decade has witnessed a boom in studies examining auditing at the partner level. This research is timely because audit partners' names in the United States will be publicly disclosed starting in 2017. This paper reviews the existing literature on audit partners, discusses some concerns...

In 2005-2006, the PCAOB imposed restrictions on auditors' tax services in order to strengthen auditor independence and improve audit quality. The restrictions resulted in a significant drop in auditor-provided tax services (APTS). To test the impact on audit quality, I partition the sample into...

In an effort to make audit reports more informative to investors, the U.K. recently passed a new audit reporting standard that requires auditors to disclose the risks of material misstatement (RMMs) that had the greatest effect on the financial statement audit. Using short-window market...

Audit firms face conflicting incentives. On one hand, they are motivated to provide high quality audits in order to protect their reputations and avoid regulatory sanctions but, on the other hand, they also need to please their clients in order to increase their revenues. We argue that these...

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,...