In this paper, we examine how CEO succession and succession planning affect perceptions of financial reporting risk among stakeholders who are responsible for and oversee firms' financial reporting (e.g., auditors, management, and audit committees). Management succession introduces uncertainty about firms' future operations, financial policies, and potential motivation for earnings management, which we predict elevates the perceived risk of financial reporting improprieties. Consistent with this prediction, we find that audit fees are higher for firms with new CEOs. Importantly, however, we note that careful CEO succession planning (i.e., promoting an “heir apparent”) attenuates perceptions of higher risk, as evidenced by a lack of an audit pricing adjustment. These results are robust to several alternative specifications and analyses designed to mitigate the concern that the association between audit fees and CEO succession and succession planning is driven by factors leading to the CEO change. We also show that audit fee increases dissipate over time as the new, non-heir CEO stays longer at the firm, reinforcing the inference that audit fees increase in response to the uncertainty surrounding a new CEO. Additionally, we do not find evidence of a deterioration in audit quality with new CEOs, independent of the succession plan.

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.

This study examines the association between a shared common auditor among suppliers and customers and trade credit. Using hand-collected pairwise trade credit data, we find that a supplier extends more trade credit to a customer audited by a common auditor. This association is robust to alternative design specifications and various sample restrictions to alleviate selection bias. We then interview trade credit managers and executives as a prelude to archival analyses exploring multiple potential mechanisms to explain this association. The collective results are most consistent with the explanation that mutual third parties to a dyadic relationship can foster trust through social connections and increased salience of reputation effects rather than that a common auditor reduces information asymmetry about the rigor of the audit process. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.