This study examines whether China's weak institutional environment results in lower-quality audits by the Big 4 firms. We find that the Big 4 assign their less experienced partners to companies that are listed only in China compared with clients cross-listed in Hong Kong. The Big 4 are less likely to issue modified audit reports, and they charge lower audit fees for clients that are listed only in China. Finally, companies listed only in China have larger signed abnormal accruals than do companies cross-listed in Hong Kong. Overall, we conclude that the weak institutional environment in China results in the Big 4 firms providing lower-quality audits to companies that are listed only in China.

We develop a state‐of‐the‐art fraud prediction model using a machine learning approach. We demonstrate the value of combining domain knowledge and machine learning methods in model building. We select our model input based on existing accounting theories, but we differ from prior accounting research by using raw accounting numbers rather than financial ratios. We employ one of the most powerful machine learning methods, ensemble learning, rather than the commonly used method of logistic regression. To assess the performance of fraud prediction models, we introduce a new performance evaluation metric commonly used in ranking problems that is more appropriate for the fraud prediction task. Starting with an identical set of theory‐motivated raw accounting numbers, we show that our new fraud prediction model outperforms two benchmark models by a large margin: the Dechow et al. logistic regression model based on financial ratios, and the Cecchini et al. support‐vector‐machine model with a financial kernel that maps raw accounting numbers into a broader set of ratios.