Ruddock, Taylor, and Taylor (2006) use an earnings conservatism framework to investigate the effects of nonaudit services (NAS) on earnings conservatism, and to test whether audit quality was impaired by NAS in Australia during the 1990s. They find no evidence of differential conservatism conditional on the level of NAS fees paid to auditors, and thus conclude that NAS have no adverse effect on audit quality. While this result may not extrapolate to the U.S. setting due to institutional difference between the two countries, the study does add to a growing body of empirical evidence that questions whether there is any logical rationale for restricting the scope of the services that auditors provide to their audit clients. In reviewing the NAS research literature over the past 40 years, one has to conclude that there is no “smoking gun” evidence linking the provision of nonaudit services with audit failures. However, the literature also finds that NAS can adversely affect the appearance of auditor independence, and this may be more than a “mere perception” problem, because there is also evidence that stock prices are significantly lower for companies that pay their auditors large fees for nonaudit services.

We show that when banks and borrowers share the same audit firm, borrowers receive lower interest rates, after controlling for potentially confounding director connectedness. The common auditor effect is observed only for opaque borrowers, and is greatest when the same audit engagement office audits the bank and borrower. A common auditor connection also matters more for longer‐tenured auditors, for geographically proximate borrowers, and when the syndicate involves fewer lenders. The effect does not hold for auditors recently sanctioned by the PCAOB. Finally, the interest rate discount is not the consequence of homophily or biased decision making, based on a comparison of postloan performance of firms with common auditor loans versus those with noncommon auditor loans.

Accounting accruals are managers' subjective estimates of future outcomes and cannot, by definition, be objectively verified by auditors prior to occurrence. This causes audits of high‐accrual firms to pose more uncertainty than audits of low‐accrual firms because of potential estimation error and a greater chance that high‐accrual firms have undetected asset realization and/or going concern problems that are related to the high level of accruals. One way that auditors can compensate for this risk exposure is to lower their threshold for issuing modified audit reports, an action that will increase modified reports and, therefore, lessen the likelihood of failing to issue a modified report when appropriate. We call this auditor reporting conservatism and test if high‐accrual firms in the United States, are more likely to receive modified audit reports for asset realization uncertainties and going concern problems. Empirical results for a large sample of U.S. publicly listed companies support the hypothesis that auditors are more conservative, that is, more likely to issue both types of modified audit reports for high‐accrual firms. Further analyses show that income‐increasing accruals are somewhat more likely to result in reporting conservatism than income‐decreasing accruals, and that only the Big Six group of auditors show evidence of reporting conservatism. These findings add to our understanding of the audit report formation process and the potentially important role played by accounting accruals in that process.

We examine how audit partners' geographic proximity to clients affects audit quality. We use hand‐collected data to show that approximately half of audit partners are assigned to clients headquartered more than 100 km away from the partners' home locations. Few of these partners relocate after receiving their assignments and, as a result, more than one‐third of clients are audited by partners who must commute long distances to visit the client in person. We explore this phenomenon by first modeling how distance affects partner‐client matching. We find that partners' geographic proximity to a prospective client is an important matching criterion, but also that trade‐offs are made when other partner characteristics such as industry specialization are more likely to be important. Next, consistent with our prediction, we show that audit quality is lower when partners reside farther from their clients. We corroborate our primary findings by showing that the association between partner distance and audit quality is mitigated when partners have access to direct flights to their clients' headquarters and when clients are geographically dispersed. Our paper should be informative for regulators, practicing auditors, and academics interested in how partner‐client matching affects audit outcomes.

Our study reports evidence on the dynamic effects of client switches on auditor reputations and fee premia. Offices of large accounting firms that lose (gain) major industry clients experience a reputation shock leading to more same‐industry client losses (gains) over the next two years. There is also a shift in audit fees charged to other same‐industry clients when a major client loss (gain) results in an audit office losing (gaining) city‐level industry leadership. A major client loss or gain also creates a short‐term capacity shock to an audit office's ability to supply high‐quality audits. However, there is no evidence of reputation spillovers to other‐industry clients in the audit office, or to clients in other offices of the accounting firm.

We investigate whether firms' tax planning affects the accuracy of analysts' forecasts. Tax planning can exacerbate the complexity of firms' operations through strategic choices to exploit tax laws. Because of its effect on firms' operations, tax planning can influence analysts' efforts to understand and forecast earnings. Specifically, if the additional complexity arising from tax planning makes firm attributes less representative of expected earnings, analysts may issue less accurate forecasts. Using auditor‐provided tax services (APTS) as a measure of tax planning, we find that, as firms spend more on tax planning, the accuracy of analysts' forecasts of both earnings per share and tax expense declines. We also document that firms with higher levels of APTS have greater year‐to‐year volatility in, and lower persistence of, effective tax rates and earnings. Our results suggest that increased firm complexity, due to greater tax planning, makes earnings and tax expense more difficult to forecast and that analysts do not properly adjust for these effects. Thus, when deciding to engage in tax planning, firms appear to make trade‐offs between potential tax savings and negative effects on earnings properties and analysts' forecasts.

Prior research emphasizes the centrality of audit offices in understanding auditing practices, and documents significant interoffice variation in audit outcomes based on industry expertise and office size. Our study examines how two city‐specific labor characteristics also affect audit offices and local audit markets: the city's average educational attainment, and the number of accountants in a city, which proxy for a city's human capital. Our argument draws on the urban economics literature and predicts that the level of human capital in a city is positively associated with an audit office's ability to conduct high‐quality audits. As expected, there is a positive association between audit quality (quality of audited earnings and accuracy of going‐concern reports) and average education level in the city in which the lead engagement office is located. This association is generally significant for both Big 4 and non‐Big 4 offices, but is relatively stronger for non‐Big 4 firms that are more tied to local labor markets. A company is also more likely to choose a non‐Big 4 auditor in cities with higher educational levels and relatively more accountants, and there is evidence of higher non‐Big 4 audit fees as a city's education level increases. Collectively, these results suggest that local labor characteristics affect audit offices, audit quality, and the ability of non‐Big 4 auditors to compete with Big 4 auditors in the audits of public companies.

We find that non‐Big 4 audit offices with greater awareness of SEC enforcement are more likely to issue first‐time going‐concern reports to distressed clients; where SEC “awareness” is measured using (i) audit office proximity to SEC regional offices, and (ii) proximity to specific SEC enforcement actions against auditors. We also show that these non‐Big 4 audit offices issue more going‐concern opinions to clients who do not subsequently fail, indicating a conservative bias that reduces the informativeness of audit reports. This conservative reporting bias is also associated with higher audit fees and higher auditor switching rates. These findings are important because non‐Big 4 firms now audit 39 percent of SEC registrants and issue 88 percent of going‐concern audit reports. For Big 4 offices, we find some evidence that awareness of SEC enforcement may improve reporting accuracy by reducing Type II errors (failing to issue a going‐concern report to a company that fails), although the number of cases is small.

This study investigates whether differences in accounting standards across countries create information costs that inhibit firms from investing in foreign markets. Using the frequency and dollar magnitude of cross‐border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) from 32 countries over the period 1998–2004, we find that the aggregate volume of M&A activity across country pairs is larger for pairs of countries with similar Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ( GAAP ), and that this increased volume of M&A activity is driven by target countries that also have strong enforcement. We also find that the 2005 mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standard ( IFRS ) attracted more cross‐border M&As among IFRS ‐adopting countries, and that this increase in M&A activity within the IFRS countries is more pronounced for country pairs with low similarity in GAAP in the pre‐ IFRS adoption period. Overall, our results highlight the role of accounting standards and enforcement in shaping cross‐border M&A activity.