Fatigue and burnout are root causes of audit quality issues and turnover. Leveraging the job demands‐resources theory, we investigate whether two mechanisms can reduce accountants' fatigue and, in turn, improve audit quality. We conduct a field study of public accountants during both normal and busy season work periods, collecting bi‐daily logs to examine whether the use of microbreaks (i.e., brief respite activities) as a job crafting mechanism and/or the receipt of supervisory support as a job resource lessen end‐of‐day fatigue. We posit and find that engaging in microbreaks is associated with reduced end‐of‐day fatigue within busy season. Similarly, we posit and find that higher levels of daily supervisory support during busy season are associated with lower end‐of‐day fatigue. However, neither of these mechanisms is associated with lower end‐of‐day fatigue during normal work periods. Our results also indicate that these two mechanisms function as complements during busy season, with either one significantly reducing end‐of‐day fatigue, but both together having an interactive effect. Further, end‐of‐day fatigue during busy season reduces sleep quality, which increases accountants' fatigue the following morning. In a follow‐up experiment, we consistently find evidence that a 1‐min microbreak reduces fatigue and that this reduction directly translates into improved error detection.

We use experimental economic markets to examine the impact of changing institutional design features on audit quality. Specifically, we manipulate auditors' economic accountability to managers by altering who hires the auditor—a manager or an independent third party—and auditors' psychological accountability to investors by explicitly stating that the auditor is hired on the investors' behalf. Our design shifts auditors' accountability from managers, who have directional goal preferences, to investors, who prefer judgment accuracy. We find that removing auditors' economic accountability to managers and replacing it with psychological accountability to investors significantly increases audit quality. This increase in audit quality occurs despite the independent third party randomly hiring auditors. In an additional treatment, we incorporate auditor accuracy into the third-party hiring algorithm and find even higher audit quality. Our results suggest that altering auditors' accountability relationships can significantly enhance audit quality. Data Availability: The laboratory market data used in this study are available from the authors upon request.

This study uses experimental economic markets to investigate the impact of risk and the potential for loss on managers' demand for audit quality. We posit that these two important contextual factors influence managers' audit quality preferences. We study these factors because they are ubiquitous to companies, and we focus on their influence on managers because managers continue to play a significant role in the auditor hiring process and we know relatively little about their auditor preferences. We predict that risk, the potential for loss, and their interaction will each decrease manager demand for high audit quality due to a desire to achieve greater reporting flexibility. Experimental results are consistent with our predictions; specifically, increased risk, the potential for loss, and to a lesser extent their interaction, significantly reduce managers' likelihood of hiring the best available auditor in the market. Path analysis indicates that this reduction in audit quality demand leads to increases in misreporting. Finally, we observe investors overpaying for assets to a greater extent when managers hire lower‐quality auditors. Our results show that the contextual factors of risk and the potential for loss, which are ubiquitous to companies, can reduce demand for audit quality, which can increase misreporting behavior and ultimately harm investors.

We use hand-collected data to analyze submission-to-acceptance (STA) times in the top-tier accounting journals relative to other top-tier business journals from 1993 through 2021. We find that, vis-à-vis other business disciplines, STA times at top-tier accounting journals were shorter in the first half of our sample period and significantly longer thereafter. We also observe shorter STA times for articles with authors from more highly ranked institutions; this effect exists only in top-tier accounting journals and has increased over time. In additional analyses, we find that our primary inferences are unchanged when considering maturity of initial journal submissions, journal-level democratization, and review process improvements related to paper quality. Our results should be of interest to researchers, journal editors, reviewers, provosts, deans, and tenure and promotion committees. Data Availability: The data used in this study are available from the sources indicated herein.