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Cpas And Big 4 Office Audit Quality, Albert Nagy, Matthew G. Sherwood, Aleksandra B. Zimmerman

2023 Faculty Bibliography

Both accounting firms and regulators recognize the importance of human capital in the audit function, yet we know little about whether and how the level of professionally qual-ified human capital varies across offices of an audit firm and whether it is associated with audit quality. In this paper, we examine the association between office professionally qualified human capital and audit quality. Using hand-collected data on Big 4 audit firm office CPA levels from 30 U.S. cities, we find that offices with relatively more professionally qual-ified human capital deliver higher quality audits, with this benefit being more pronounced for audits performed …