This study investigates whether fee dependence within the audit firms’ offices jeopardises auditor independence. Fee dependence is examined at both the national audit firm level as well as the local office level and in a setting where public disclosure of fees is mandatory. We focus our tests on audit fee dependence and at the same time we control for the effects of non-audit service fee dependence post the 1989 mergers. We operationalise the exercise of independent judgement in auditing by the propensity to issue qualified audit opinions. If fee dependence affects auditors’ independent judgement, then auditors are less likely to qualify the accounts. The study's results show that the level of auditor fee dependence does not affect auditor propensity to issue unqualified audit opinions. The findings remain robust to a number of sensitivity tests including the analyses controlling for the effects of non-audit service fee dependence and other settings in which there is heightened pressure on auditors to confront the effects of fee dependence on exercising independent audit judgement.

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Abstract This paper investigates brand name, industry specialization, and leadership audit pricing in the wake of the mergers that created the Big 6 and the Big 5 accounting firms. For samples of Australian listed public companies in each of the postmerger years 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1998, we estimate national audit fee premiums for the Big 6/5 auditors and the industry specialists and leaders. We find limited support for the ability of the Big 6/5 to obtain fee premiums over non‐Big 6/5 for those industries not having specialist auditors. Nonspecialist Big 6/5 auditors are able to obtain fee premiums over nonspecialist non‐Big 6/5 auditors for those industries having specialist auditors. However, this result only holds among the smaller half of our sample. We do not find strong support for the presence of industry specialist premiums in the postmerger years, especially after 1990, using various definitions of industry specialist. We find, at best, limited support for the presence of industry leadership premiums. The evidence suggests that after the Big 8/6 audit firm mergers, some caution is required in generalizing the Craswell, Francis, and Taylor 1995 finding of national market industry specialist premiums. More generally, the study raises questions about the tenuous link between the concept of specialization and national market‐share statistics.

The pattern of disagreement between bond raters suggests that banks and insurance firms are inherently more opaque than other types of firms. Moody's and S&P split more often over these financial intermediaries, and the splits are more lopsided, as theory here predicts. Uncertainty over the banks stems from certain assets, loans and trading assets in particular, the risks of which are hard to observe or easy to change. Banks' high leverage, which invites agency problems, compounds the uncertainty over their assets. These findings bear on both the existence and reform of bank regulation.

We compare underwriting performance by commercial bank-affiliated firms (Section 20s) and traditional investment banks over the period 1995–1998. We find that gross spreads are lower in the case of Section 20 underwritings, but that yield spreads are not. Our sample includes a substantial number of observations following changes in Federal Reserve policies that substantially eased restrictions on Section 20 activities in early 1997. Our findings differ somewhat from results in the literature that focused on periods prior to these policy changes. We find, for example, no evidence that a prior commercial bank lending relationship influences underwriting yields for any type of issue. Our results also fail to confirm earlier evidence that collective Section 20 underwritings produce a favorable competitive effect on gross spreads and yield spreads. We find substantial evidence that both the underwriting mix and the underwriting process are relevant to the behavior of gross spreads and yield spreads over the sample period.

The recent repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act in the US has cleared the way for commercial banks to enter the securities underwriting business. Many of the concerns that resulted in the original passage of the Glass–Steagall Act, however, still exist. One of these is the possible conflict of interest a universal bank faces. This paper provides evidence on this issue from the experience of Canada following its removal of restrictions on chartered bank ownership of investment dealers. Both ex ante bond yield comparisons between commercial and investment bank underwritten issues and equity price reactions to bond issue announcements provide no evidence of a conflict of interest.

We report a gift exchange experiment. Firms make wage offers; workers respond by determining an effort level. Higher effort is more costly to workers, and firms have no mechanism for punishing or rewarding workers. Consistent with the gift exchange hypothesis, workers provide more effort at higher wages, but undergraduates provide substantially less effort than MBAs. Evidence suggests this results from differences in prior work experience. Firms' nonbinding effort requests are at least partially honored, resulting in increased overall effort for undergraduates. Although higher wages are relatively more costly for lower productivity firms, workers do not provide them with more effort.