This study explores whether a firm’s auditor choice affects its ability to access foreign equity capital. Using the equity holdings of 35,665 foreign mutual funds from 30 countries for the period 1998–2009, we find evidence that appointing a Big 4 auditor is associated with the increased level of foreign mutual fund ownership in firms. Our results are robust when conditioned on firm-level information asymmetries, country-level information disclosure quality, and when employing the Enron–Andersen fiasco as the natural experiment. Furthermore, appointing Big 4 auditors is particularly important for firms to attract foreign capital during the 2008 global financial crisis.

In order to reconcile weak evidence of supply-side determinants of commonality in liquidity in previous studies, we examine commonality in liquidity in China over the period 1995–2012. Consistent with supply-side explanations, we find that market declines and market volatility increase liquidity commonality. To identify the direct relationship between the supply-side determinants and commonality in liquidity, we provide two specific tests and show that an increase in market participants has a negative effect on liquidity commonality, while the split-share-structure reform in 2005–2007 that results in a large increase in shares supply has a positive impact on liquidity commonality. Finally, we find that commonality in liquidity also has a real impact on the economy.