Enron's collapse is generally viewed as a morality tale - the natural result of managerial greed, a clueless board, and feckless gatekeepers. But none of these aspects of the story clearly distinguishes Enron from other major firms during the bubble era of the late 90s. This material identifies...

This paper analyzes the auditor choices for a sample of 2,333 predominantly small and mid-sized Finnish firms. Finland requires virtually all commercial enterprises to have a financial statement audit, but allows the smallest firms to choose from four types of audit firms: first tier...

This paper examines the effect of financial restatements on the firm's source of debt financing, contractual debt covenants and cost of debt, both in the public and the private debt markets. Using a sample of public debt issued, we find evidence of higher treasury-spreads post restatement, which...

We investigate the association between managerial overconfidence and audit fees, as well as the effect of a strong audit committee on this relation. Overconfident managers tend to overestimate their ability and the future payouts of projects but underestimate the likelihood and impact of adverse...

Although prior literature has documented a positive association between business risk and audit fees, it remains unclear whether, in addition to expending greater audit effort on riskier clients, auditors also charge a risk premium. This is an important issue because a risk premium is a...

Research on the association between abnormal audit fees (measuring audit effort) and financial misconduct has produced mixed results. The use of actual misstatements in this research creates small-sample inferences, introduces systematic selection bias, and reduces the scope of sample coverage....

This paper reports the findings of a comprehensive study of the audit services market of an emerging market economy, namely, Bangladesh. It covers four important aspects of auditing in the country. They are (i) audit concentration; (ii) audit fee trends; (iii) big-four premium; and (iv) audit...

This study examines the factors that lead to issuing negative opinions on semiannual reports while issuing positive opinions in annual reports from the perspective of auditor-client relationships in listed companies in Taiwan. The empirical results show that the importance of the client is...

We study how informed, strategic trading affects audit quality and investment efficiency. With the auditor's legal liability payment based on the decrease in the market price after an audit failure, informed trading provides a hedge to the auditor against legal liability risk. This weakens...