Business Commons^™

Usefulness Of Audit-Firm Transparency Disclosures, Jooanne Choi

2022

South Korea is one of the first countries to enact audit transparency disclosure, requiring public accounting firms to file an annual report containing information on audit production, governance, operations, on-going litigations, and regulatory inspection results. In this dissertation, I make use of this rich information setting to address issues concerning audit quality management systems, audit-firm governance, and resource allocation in audit productions.

Motivated by the recent call from the PCAOB (Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board) for better understanding of audit-firm quality control system, the first chapter (sole-authored) examines the determinants of and return on firm-level investment in quality management. I …

Audit Firm Culture: An Evolution Of The Audit Profession In Response To External Forces, Christina T. Alberti

2022

The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting business operations throughout the world, including the working procedures of audit professionals. Yet, to date, research on COVID-19’s impact on auditing is limited. This is despite its potential long-term implications. Thus, my dissertation uses a mix of research methods to examine auditors’ response to, and regulators’ evaluation of auditors’ response to, COVID-19.

The first paper (co-authored) synthesizes research on audit firm culture (AFC) over the past decade, reviewing recent developments in research on AFC and its influence on audit quality and auditors’ work attitudes. Using a three-phase model based on prior research and professional guidance, …

Health And Healthcare In The Financial Reporting And Audit Environments, Landi Morris

2022

This dissertation is comprised of three papers that integrate analyses of health, health crises, and healthcare entities in the financial reporting and audit processes. The first paper considers how physical health influences audit outcomes via auditors’ cognitive processing. The second paper considers a global health disruption that impacts the audit process. In the third paper, I examine financial and tax reporting of hospital entities. I describe each paper in further detail below.

The first paper, co-authored with Rani Hoitash, examines whether influenza (flu), a potential threat to the conduct of public company audits, is associated with audit outcomes. Because the …

Three Papers On Sell-Side Financial Analysts, Zheng Liu

2022

This first paper (co-authored) tests the effect of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), which entered into force on 3 January 2018, on European-based sell-side financial analysts. We find that MiFID II, in part, unbundles brokers’ execution and research services. We assess the effectiveness of MiFID II in unbundling and find that the trading volume generated by the brokers that issued recommendation revisions declined significantly after the enactment of MiFID II. Further, in addition to a smaller price reaction to EU broker analysts’ recommendation revisions in the post period than in the pre period, these broker analysts appear …

The Influence Of Internal Audit Competency On Financial Reporting Quality And Enterprise Risk Management, Melissa E. Renschler

2020

The internal audit function (IAF) is critically important to financial reporting quality and enterprise risk management (ERM). Following both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the financial crisis of 2008, there have been improvements to other monitoring functions, such as the audit committee, management, and the external auditor, but regulation over the IAF is nearly absent. Further, our understanding of how IAF competency is developed and how IAF competency impacts both financial reporting quality and ERM outcomes is limited. My dissertation consists of three archival studies that investigate IAF competency using LinkedIn data. Taken together, these three studies contribute to …

Technology Based Audit Tools: Implications For Audit Quality, Annie L. Witte

2020

Technology as an exogenous shock has proven to have pervasive effects on auditing firms, practitioners, regulators, and global markets. However, the dynamic nature of technology makes it uniquely challenging to articulate technology’s largescale implications on the auditing profession in recent times. Understanding how current technology has helped shape the contemporary auditing profession is vital to identify points of inflection within the industry (i.e., areas of risk and change), and key to elucidating the future of where the field is going.

The first paper (sole-authored) is a literature review that synthesizes auditing studies across methodologies, including archival, experimental, and qualitative methods. …

The Influence Of Cognitive Factors On The Relationship Between Accounting Standard Precision And Aggressive Financial Reporting, Kara E. Hunter

2017

The U.S. SEC has formally advocated for the creation of a single set of global accounting standards. As the SEC considers converging U.S. GAAP with IFRS, there is heightened interest in how the precision of accounting standard influences the quality of the financial reporting process. My dissertation consists of three studies that seek to address how accounting standard precision interacts with different behavioral factors to influence aggressive financial reporting decisions and auditor judgment. Paper one presents evidence of a significant interactive effect of standard precision and preparer incentive horizon. Specifically, we find evidence that when the incentive horizon is long …

The Influence Of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure On Stakeholder Decision-Making, Andrew C. Stuart

2017

As part of the Disclosure Effectiveness Initiative, the SEC is seeking public comments on whether sustainability disclosures are important to investors’ decisions. The interest in sustainability disclosures by the SEC coincides with the recent increase in companies voluntarily publishing corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. My dissertation consists of three studies that examine CSR disclosures, with an emphasis on how disclosure influences stakeholder decision-making.

Part one reviews the CSR disclosure literature contained in accounting journals. I find an overlap between CSR disclosure issues and traditional accounting issues examined in the literature. Focusing on where the issues overlap, I separate the CSR …

Environmental, Social, And Governance Risk And Performance: Implications For Audit And Corporate Governance Research, Jenna J. Burke

2017

This dissertation examines oversight of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) related risk and performance. These considerations are a new piece of business language, and are crucial in monitoring and evaluating the sustainable impact of modern corporations. The dissertation is comprised of three archival studies, which together contribute to an emerging accounting literature at the intersection of audit and corporate governance. The first study uses hand-collected data on voluntary board-level committees that oversee ESG-related issues to investigate the performance implications of these committees. This paper presents a theoretical framework and methodology that incorporate the committee’s role in shared value creation and …

Information Technology Audits By Internal Auditors: Exploring The Evolution Of Integrated It Audits, Joy M. Gray

2016

The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) defines integrated auditing as auditing that looks at more than one aspect of the area under review; which may include financial, operational, information technology (IT), compliance, environmental, and/or fraud related audit objectives. I examine the internal auditing function’s (IAF’s) use of integrated IT auditing and provide evidence of how internal auditors’ IT audit activities contribute to IT governance, a critical subset of corporate governance. Importantly, increased understanding of these IT audit practices assists educators in curriculum design reflective of practitioner needs.

I have three interrelated studies. The first synthesizes literature through an historical lens …

Fair Value Measurements, Nathan Hatch Cannon

2013

This dissertation consists of two empirical studies that investigate fair value measurement issues currently facing the accounting profession--one from the perspective of the auditor, and the other from the perspective of the financial statement user. The results of each study are described below.

This first study examines experienced auditors' descriptions of specific client experiences in which auditing fair value measurements (FVMs) was particularly challenging. Based on a field survey of high-level engagement team personnel from several large firms, we identify a number of key issues currently facing the profession in auditing FVMs. First, when asked about challenges faced in auditing …

Changes In Auditing: A Three Part Investigation, Denise R. Hanes

2013

This dissertation consists of three studies investigating changes in auditing. This abstract summarizes each study, including purpose, methodology, and findings.

The first study synthesizes the extant literature examining geographically distributed work arrangements in other disciplines such as management and social psychology. Focusing on communication and coordination, knowledge sharing, work design, and social identity in geographically distributed teams, I identify opportunities for future research to expand our understanding of how geographically distributing audit work impacts auditors, the audit process, and audit quality.

My second paper explores a key contributor to the success of geographically distributed work highlighted in my literature review: …

Detecting Deception In Client Inquiries, D. Kip Holderness Jr.

2013

Auditors frequently gather information by conducting client inquiries (Bennett and Hatfield 2013; Hirst and Koonce 1996; Trompeter and Wright 2010). When clients are attempting to hide frauds and irregularities, auditors need to be alert during inquiries to verbal and nonverbal cues emanating from clients that might be indicative of intentional deception. This dissertation consists of two studies investigating the detection of deception in client inquiries. The first study provides a summary of extant literature examining deception detection, with an emphasis on those studies that have implications for client inquiries. I propose several avenues for future research that will contribute to …

Three Interdisciplinary Studies On It Outsourcing, Sonia Gantman Vilvovsky

2012

This dissertation provides interdisciplinary insights into the role of client's internal collaborative experience in managing communication during a complex outsourced project, building a quality client-vendor relationship and ultimately achieving success in the project. Each of the three studies in this dissertation identifies a gap in existing scholarship and proposes an interdisciplinary research agenda.

The first essay advances the development of the public sector IT outsourcing (ITO) inquiry by consolidating the existing research into an analytical framework and validating a part of the framework with rich qualitative data collected from collaborative initiatives of public safety agencies ("Public Safety Networks", or PSN). …

Learning The “Craft Of Auditing”: Applications Of The Cognitive Apprenticeship Framework, Kimberly D. Westermann

2011

This dissertation consists of three studies examining component(s) of the cognitive apprenticeship (CA) model applied to on-the-job learning in auditing. This abstract summarizes each study, including purpose, methodology, and findings. The first study provides descriptive evidence on the importance and pervasiveness of CA as a model of on-the-job learning (OTJL) in auditing, investigates changes in its use over time, and assesses factors that promote or hinder auditors’ learning through apprenticeship. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 relatively new and more experienced audit partners at a Big 4 firm, seeking their impressions about past and current OTJL practices in public accounting. …