Abstract Reviews the book "A Time Series Analysis of the Effect of Internal Audit Activities on External Audit Fees," by Wanda A. Wallace.

ABSTRACT: The literature provides mixed evidence on whether investors find audit reports modified for going concern reasons to be useful. Using a substantially larger sample than previous studies, we observe negative excess returns when the going concern audit report (GCAR) is disclosed. We find that the reaction is more negative if the GCAR cites a problem with obtaining financing, suggesting that the GCAR provides new information to investors. Also, the reaction is more adverse if the GCAR triggers a technical violation of a debt covenant that restricts the firm from getting a GCAR. The evidence suggests that institutional investors drive the reaction to the GCAR, since there is no detectable reaction at low levels of institutional ownership. The market reaction gets more negative as the level of institutional ownership increases, and there is a decline in institutional ownership after the GCAR is issued. We attribute these results to sophisticated investors’ awareness of the firm’s financing needs and the covenants carried by the firm’s debt.

Audit clients often employ a former partner of their present auditor as an officer or a director. This “revolving door” practice presents a potential threat to auditor independence. Using the Jones (1991) model to calculate abnormal accruals for firms in 1998 and 1999, we find that firms employing former partners as officers or directors report larger signed and unsigned abnormal accruals than other firms, after controlling for other factors that plausibly affect abnormal accruals. To ensure that the results are not driven by performance characteristics of the former partner firms, we construct a performance-matched control sample and obtain consistent results. We also observe a disproportionately higher (lower) proportion of former partner firms than expected just meeting (missing) analysts' earnings forecasts.

Abstract Examines the effect Laventhol & Horwath's (L&H) disclosure of their auditor's bankruptcy and the appointment of a successor auditor on the company's stock prices. Insurance hypothesis; Investors' assignment of a value to the right to recover investment losses from the auditor; Adverse effect of bankruptcy disclosure on market prices of L&H clients.

ABSTRACT: Audit researchers have a long-standing interest in understanding whether issuing a going concern report to financially stressed clients protects auditors from litigation. An endogeneity issue arises, in that litigation risk affects the going concern decision and the going concern decision impacts auditor litigation risk. Using a simultaneous equations approach, we find a significant positive association between auditors' ex ante litigation risk and going concern reporting. By applying simultaneous equations, we also find a significant negative association between going concern reporting and auditor litigation, suggesting that auditors deter lawsuits by issuing going concern reports to their financially stressed clients. Our research further provides a more rigorous analysis of the relation between going concern reporting and lawsuit outcomes in the form of auditor litigation dismissals, small settlement amounts, and large settlement amounts. Our results indicate that when auditors are named in lawsuits, having issued a going concern report reduces the likelihood of large financial settlements. Data Availability: The data used in this study are publicly available through sources identified in the study.

We build a publicly available database that tracks economic activity in the United States at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies. We report weekly statistics on consumer spending, business revenues, job postings, and employment rates disaggregated by county, sector, and income group. Using the publicly available data, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the economy by analyzing heterogeneity in its effects across subgroups. High-income individuals reduced spending sharply in March 2020, particularly in sectors that require in-person interaction. This reduction in spending greatly reduced the revenues of small businesses in affluent, dense areas. Those businesses laid off many of their employees, leading to widespread job losses, especially among low-wage workers in such areas. High-wage workers experienced a V-shaped recession that lasted a few weeks, whereas low-wage workers experienced much larger, more persistent job losses. Even though consumer spending and job postings had recovered fully by December 2021, employment rates in low-wage jobs remained depressed in areas that were initially hard hit, indicating that the temporary fall in labor demand led to a persistent reduction in labor supply. Building on this diagnostic analysis, we evaluate the effects of fiscal stimulus policies designed to stem the downward spiral in economic activity. Cash stimulus payments led to sharp increases in spending early in the pandemic, but much smaller responses later in the pandemic, especially for high-income households. Real-time estimates of marginal propensities to consume provided better forecasts of the impacts of subsequent rounds of stimulus payments than historical estimates. Overall, our findings suggest that fiscal policies can stem secondary declines in consumer spending and job losses, but cannot restore full employment when the initial shock to consumer spending arises from health concerns. More broadly, our analysis demonstrates how public statistics constructed from private sector data can support many research and real-time policy analyses, providing a new tool for empirical macroeconomics.