Audits by private, third-party auditors are frequently mandated to ensure compliance with regulations (e.g., accounting or environmental standards). We examine how such mandates shape the market for audits. In our empirical examination, we focus on one of the oldest and most prominent audit...

Auditors fulfill a crucial societal role by increasing the credibility of financial reports, which requires that appropriate audit quality be provided and auditors are factually independent and perceived as such. So far, regulators and researchers have focused on a few measures for improving...

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the impact of disciplinary sanctions imposed on Spanish auditing firms and their engagement partners. The disciplinary sanctions resulted from external investigations, which revealed misapplications of auditing standards. In particular, we...

This study aims to examine the effect of corporate governance mechanisms on audit reporting. Whereas the specific purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the number of audit committees, the role of independent (non-executive) board members, institutional ownership, and ownership...

The present paper aims to provide empirical evidence regarding the impact of shareholder activism on earnings management. Specifically, it is focused on investigating the moderating role of an external governance mechanism such as external audit quality. Based on a sample of French companies...

A widely held assumption in policy making and empirical research is that increasing the strength of public enforcement improves financial reporting quality and audit quality. This paper provides a more nuanced view. In a model with a manager who can manage earnings, a strategic auditor, and an...

The effects of taxes have been discussed in almost every decision context in the extant literature, but the relationship between taxes and auditing has amazingly merited little attention. We explore the relationship between audit effort, audit quality and taxes from the perspective of both...

We use data from China to examine whether regulations that limit management influence over auditors improve audit quality. China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) issued two rules in 2004 aimed at improving audit quality for state-owned...

We examine the association between country-level government quality and firms' choice of external auditors. Using a cross-sectional sample of 142,193 firm-year observations from 46 countries over 1998-2007, we show that the government quality of a country has a significant positive effect on the...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of disciplinary sanctions on audit quality, based on the external oversight system set up in Spain in the early nineties. Specifically, we examine the effects of the sanctions imposed by the Institute of Accounting and Auditing (ICAC), a...