Forthcoming in Financial Accountability & Management Public audit has been under-theorized, the existing literature too dominated by institutional description. Public audit may be interpreted as promoting transparency in order to generate trust, thus leading to legitimacy. Disaggregating...

This study examines the relevance of modified audit opinions (MAO) in private debt contracting. We use the auditor's explanatory language to partition MAOs into Inconsistency opinions, resulting from an accounting change or a restatement; and Inadequacy opinions, arising from a material...

The critical global role of audit firms, combined with the scarcity of qualified staff and downward pressure on fees, has increased the importance of understanding efficiency in this industry. This paper examines the technical and allocative inefficiencies of audit firm staffing using data from...

In this paper, we study spatial competition in the U.S. audit market while accounting for its two-tiered nature. We provide evidence on the differential impact that market share distances within and between the players in the large and small audit markets have on competition. We find that the...

Using a sample of key supplier-customer relationships, we investigate whether an auditor common to a supplier and customer firm reduces information asymmetry between the two parties, leading to an increase in relationship-specific investments. We find evidence that the presence of a common...

Theory suggests that information asymmetry between supplier and customer firms exacerbates the holdup problem. We investigate if an auditor common to the supplier and customer firm improves information flows leading to reduction in the holdup problem. Consistent with this notion, we find that...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of clients' decisions to switch audit firm and misstate earnings as a function of auditor tenure. Adapting the conditional choice probability framework of Hotz and Miller (1993), which simplifies the estimation to a conditional logit, we find that dynamic...

Common ownership (i.e., financial institutions’ block holding of stock in industry rivals) and its implications for investors are matters of current interest and debate (SEC 2018). Motivated by this debate and the salience of common ownership, we investigate whether and how auditors price...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) was enacted to “protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws…” The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) was created as part of SOX and given a duty to impose...