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...

We examine the auditor perception of recognized vs. disclosed obligations as they relate to two key decisions auditors make: determining audit fees and whether to issue a going concern opinion. We study two pairs of obligations – capital leases and operating leases and on-balance sheet and...

Recent research challenges the notion that the Big 4 auditors provide a higher quality audit relative to non-Big 4 and suggests that the Big N effect could be due to self-selection. We contribute to this debate by controlling for pre-audit earnings quality, an important omitted variable in prior...