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...

Audit firms need to provide high quality audits but they also need to please their clients. We argue that these conflicting incentives become manifest when comparing the incentive effects of equity ownership on engagement quality (EQ) reviewers and audit engagement partners. We predict that EQ...

Although mandatory audit partner rotation has become prevalent worldwide, prior empirical research seldom considers how the successor partners are identified and the economic consequences of different rotation strategies. We examine the importance of internal networks to the selection of...

We extend recent research on the links between political connections and financial reporting by examining the role of auditor choice. Our evidence that public firms with political connections are more likely to appoint a Big 4 auditor supports the intuition that insiders in these firms are eager...