A large body of research has studied audit fees aiming to determine whether they reflect auditors’ response to clients’ risks, auditors’ expertise, competitive pressures in the audit market, and independence issues between auditors and clients. Badertscher, Jorgensen, Katz, and Kinney [2014] study the effect of auditor litigation risk on audit fees. Litigation risk is expected to be a strong incentive for auditors to deliver high quality audits and an important determinant of audit fees. Nevertheless, determining the impact of litigation risk is complicated because although there is considerable variation in audit fees, there are scarce opportunities to examine variation in litigation risk. This paper provides a brief summary of extant studies examining the effect of auditor litigation on audit fees, and discusses research design issues and future research opportunities in this area.

This study examines whether auditor industry specialization, measured using the auditor's within‐industry market share, improves audit quality and results in a fee premium. After matching clients of specialist and nonspecialist auditors on a number of dimensions, as well as only on industry and size, there is no evidence of differences in commonly used audit‐quality proxies between these two groups of auditors. Moreover, there is no consistent evidence of a specialist fee premium. The matched sample results are confirmed by including client fixed effects in the main models, examining a sample of clients that switched auditors, and using an alternative proxy that aims to capture the auditor's industry knowledge. The combined evidence in this study suggests that the auditor's within‐industry market share is not a reliable indicator of audit quality. Nevertheless, these findings do not imply that industry knowledge is not important for auditors, but that the methodology used in extant archival studies to examine this issue does not fully parse out the effects of auditor industry specialization from client characteristics.

This study tests whether firms seek to mitigate the adverse effects of Financial Reporting Complexity (FRC) by investing in accounting expertise. We develop a measure of FRC based on the complexity of accounting standards that govern annual disclosures. We find that FRC is positively related to the accounting expertise on a firm’s board of directors and audit committee. We also find that accounting expertise mitigates the relation between FRC and negative reporting outcomes. Collectively, this study increases our understanding of the actions firms take to mitigate the negative consequences of FRC, and the role of accounting expertise in this setting.

This study examines whether differences in proxies for audit quality between Big 4 and non-Big 4 audit firms could be a reflection of their respective clients’ characteristics. In our analyses, we use three audit-quality proxies—discretionary accruals, the ex ante cost-of-equity capital, and analyst forecast accuracy—and employ propensity-score and attribute-based matching models in attempt to control for differences in client characteristics between the two auditor groups while estimating the audit-quality effects. Using these matching models, we find that the effects of Big 4 auditors are insignificantly different from those of non-Big 4 auditors with respect to the three audit-quality proxies. Our results suggest that differences in these proxies between Big 4 and non-Big 4 auditors largely reflect client characteristics and, more specifically, client size. We caution the reader that this study has not resolved the question, although we hope that it encourages other researchers to explore alternative methodologies that separate client characteristics from audit-quality effects.

The United Kingdom mandated expanded audit reports in two waves, starting in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Prior studies of the first wave, which included large and highly regulated companies, concluded that expanded reports have limited incremental value. We focus on the second wave, which included companies listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM). The AIM is characterized by emerging companies that are smaller, riskier, and subject to lighter regulatory requirements and to private monitoring. We examine whether investors and other stakeholders benefit from expanded reports in this setting. We document that AIM companies have shorter expanded reports and fewer key audit matters. Next, we demonstrate that these reports have negligible incremental information value for investors or consequences for the quality and cost of audits. Finally, although we find that some variations in the expanded reports' content are associated with investor reactions to the annual report and with audit fees, variations in external monitoring and company size do not play an incremental role. By focusing on a set of companies with weaker information environments, our findings help to extend the conclusions from prior studies about the limited incremental value of expanded reports.

Investors, regulators, and academics question the usefulness of going concern opinions (GCOs). We assess whether GCOs provide incremental information, relative to other predictors of corporate default. Our measure of incremental information is the additional predictive power that GCOs give to a default model. Using data from 1996 to 2015, initially we find no difference in predictive power between GCOs alone and a default model that includes financial ratios. However, there is an imperfect overlap between GCOs and other predictors. We show that GCOs increase the predictive power of several models that include ratios, market variables, probability of default estimates, and credit ratings. Using a model that includes ratios and market variables, GCOs increase the number of predicted defaults by 4.4%, without increasing Type II errors. Our findings suggest that GCOs summarize a complex set of conditions not captured by other predictors of default.

Accounting studies often encounter observations with extreme values that can influence coefficient estimates and inferences. Two widely used approaches to address influential observations in accounting studies are winsorization and truncation. While expedient, both depend on researcher-selected cutoffs, applied on a variable-by-variable basis, which, unfortunately, can alter legitimate data points. We compare the efficacy of winsorization, truncation, influence diagnostics (Cook's Distance), and robust regression at identifying influential observations. Replication of three published accounting studies shows that the choice impacts estimates and inferences. Simulation evidence shows that winsorization and truncation are ineffective at identifying influential observations. While influence diagnostics and robust regression both outperform winsorization and truncation, overall, robust regression outperforms the other methods. Since robust regression is a theoretically appealing and easily implementable approach based on a model's residuals, we recommend that future accounting studies consider using robust regression, or at least report sensitivity tests using robust regression. JEL Classifications: C12; C13; C18; C51; C52; M41. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

The costs and benefits of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 ( SOX ) have been oft‐debated since the inception of the Act. Much of the extant literature has assessed the costs and benefits of SOX to publicly traded companies. We focus on the costs of SOX compliance for private firms wanting to exit the private market via either an acquisition by a public firm or an IPO . Consistent with our predictions we establish two principal findings. First, SOX appears to have shifted the preferences of private firms from going public to exiting the private market via acquisition by a public acquirer. Second, private target deal multiples are increasing in variables that proxy for a private target's level of pre‐acquisition SOX compliance. These findings suggest that SOX ‐related costs have both restricted the action space of possible exit strategies for private firms and led to lower deal multiples for those private acquisition targets that are less likely to be SOX compliant prior to acquisition.

Audit teams may consult with their firm’s national office to obtain specialized expertise, satisfy regulatory and quality control requirements, and demonstrate due professional care. We describe the consultation process based on PCAOB standards, firm methodologies, and auditor interviews. We explain different types of consultations and highlight differences in the determinants and usefulness of mandatory versus voluntary consultations. Using PCAOB inspection data, we show that formal consultations are largely predictable based on engagement characteristics and, on average, are not associated with audit quality. However, two subsets of formal consultations that focus on accounting issues and occur earlier in the engagement process are associated with greater regulatory compliance and higher audit quality. Hence, an increasing reliance on all types of consultations does not automatically translate into higher audit quality. Collectively, our findings deepen our understanding of auditors’ use of national office consultations and their implications for audit practice. Data Availability: Audit engagement data from the PCAOB are proprietary; other data are from public sources.