Reviews the book "Expert Systems in Accounting," by Alex Edwards and N.A.D. Connell.

Reviews the book "Accounting Information Systems: A Book of Readings With Cases," edited by James A. Davis and Barry E. Cushing.

We shed light on housing price inertia by investigating how the home-sale mechanism affects housing price dynamics. Using Australian data, we find that auction prices forecast better and display less momentum than negotiated prices. These findings are robust to alternative price measurements and different sample selection corrections. Motivated by microtheory that predicts different weights for buyer and seller values in auction and negotiated prices, we decompose housing prices into two diffusion processes and interpret them as buyer value and seller value, respectively. The seller value updates much more slowly, which could be an important driver of housing price inertia.

Our study is motivated by the theory of credence goods in the auditing setting. We propose that audit committee accounting expertise should reduce information asymmetries between the auditor and the client, thereby limiting auditors' ability to over-audit and under-audit. Consistent with this notion, our results indicate that when audit committees have accounting expertise, clients (1) pay lower fees when changes in standards decrease required audit effort; (2) pay a smaller fee premium in the presence of remediated material weaknesses; and (3) have a reduced likelihood of restatement when audit market competition is high. Our findings in the under-auditing setting generally are strongest among non-Big 4 engagements, consistent with non-Big 4 auditors being less sensitive to market-wide disciplining mechanisms such as reputation, legal liability, and professional regulation. We also provide evidence that the nature of audit committee members' accounting expertise differentially impacts the committee's ability to curtail over- and under-auditing.