There is now a great deal of evidence that large audit firms provide higher quality audits and offer greater credibility to clients' financial statements than small audit firms. The stock market reacts more favourably when a company switches to a large auditor rather than to a small auditor (Nichols and Smith, 1983; and Eichenseher et al., 1989); large audit firms give more accurate signals of ...

High-quality internal audit is expected to lead to high-quality financial reporting. High-quality financial reporting expresses itself in earning quality. Earning quality has been playing a key role in capital market for a long time. Finance users pay special attention to earning quality because they make their decision based on it. On the other hand, the market economy will experience awful, i...

The existing literature on audit opinion shopping provides inconsistent evidence on whether such shopping has any association with abnormal audit fees. In this paper, we hypothesize that firms engage in audit opinion shopping and pay an abnormal audit fee only when their degree of accounting quality is low. To examine the issue, we group firms on the basis of their change in return on assets (R...

Audit firms are faced with increasing demands for audit efficiency and effectiveness. Increasing knowledge sharing in audit engagements can help them respond to this challenge, and this study seeks to advance understanding of the extent and determinants of such sharing. Data collected from auditors of two Big Four audit firms suggest that both firms have high, but far from complete, levels of k...

This study investigates whether an auditor's experience of litigation in the recent past affects subsequent financial reporting quality. At the audit firm level, we find accounting misstatements occur significantly less (more) often after audit firms are sued (not sued). At the audit office level, the negative association between past litigation and future misstatements is stronger for offices ...

Since 1999 regulators have attempted to improve the monitoring of financial reporting by exerting significant pressure on firms to appoint accounting financial experts (AFEs) to their audit committees. Yet, many firms have been reluctant to do so, which has made these firms more prone to financial reporting problems. We examine appointments of AFEs to the audit committees of S&P 1500 firms duri...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that audit clients are automating more internal controls over time. Audit firms customarily respond to their clients’ increasing IT (information technology) risks by including more IT audit specialists in their external audit engagements. But, using IT audit specialists on the audit engagement to examine the IT risks that external financial statement auditors can exa...