Accounting Commons^™

Breaking The Glass Ceiling: Do Female Auditors In Public Accounting Shine?, Katie Dubois

Honors Theses and Capstones

This honors thesis examines the significance that female auditors have in shaping the public accounting profession. The study investigates the impact of female auditors on various aspects of the profession, including quality, profitability, and risk. By conducting a comprehensive literature review and analyzing gathered data, this research explores the factors that contribute to the influence of female auditors and the implications for the profession.

The findings highlight that female auditors do in fact impact the public accounting profession positively. Moreover, the data revealed that gender-diverse audit teams enhance audit quality and firm profitability. Client relationships are also positively influenced, as …

Do Big 4 Auditors Provide Higher Audit Service Quality Than Second-Tier Auditors In Small And Mid-Sized Initial Public Offerings?, Stefan K. Slavov

Doctoral Dissertations

Big 4 auditors perform most audits of companies that issue initial public offerings (IPOs). Regulators have expressed interest in increasing IPO audit market competition and a growing body of evidence suggests that Second-Tier auditors could provide IPO audit service quality comparable to that of Big 4 auditors. However, there exists limited empirical evidence on whether IPO audit service quality varies with auditor type. I investigate whether IPO audit service quality differs between Big 4 and Second-Tier auditors for a sample of small and mid-sized IPOs from 2005 through 2019. I find that Big 4 clients are associated with lower pre-IPO …

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, …

The Effect Of Investor Sentiment On Earnings Management, Lin Chen

Accounting Dissertations

The association between investor sentiment and corporate reporting decisions/outcomes has been recently examined in the accounting and finance literature. As an important outcome of corporate reporting decisions, earnings management (EM) may be affected by investor sentiment. In this dissertation, I examine two research questions. The first is whether investor sentiment is associated with the propensity of firms’ engaging in the two primary forms of EM: accrual earnings management (AEM) and real earnings management (REM). The second question is whether firms’ internal governance strength and external audit quality would moderate the association between investor sentiment and AEM as well as REM. …

The Effect Of Investor Sentiment On Earnings Management, Lin Chen

Accounting Dissertations

The association between investor sentiment and corporate reporting decisions/outcomes has been recently examined in the accounting and finance literature. As an important outcome of corporate reporting decisions, earnings management (EM) may be affected by investor sentiment. In this dissertation, I examine two research questions. The first is whether investor sentiment is associated with the propensity of firms’ engaging in the two primary forms of EM: accrual earnings management (AEM) and real earnings management (REM). The second question is whether firms’ internal governance strength and external audit quality would moderate the association between investor sentiment and AEM as well as REM. …

Big 4 Office Personnel And Audit Quality, Jacob Gatlin

PhD in Business Administration Dissertations

Because U.S. Big 4 audit quality is inconsistent between office locations within the same firm, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has maintained a standing Audit Quality Indicator Project designed to assist academics, practitioners, and its own inspection teams in identifying specific areas in which high audit quality may fail to be achieved. While many of the PCAOB audit quality indicators have been examined in prior research, information regarding the personnel comprising each office audit department has been difficult to glean because personnel data is not publicly disclosed by the Big 4.

This study examines certain personnel inputs and …

Is A Pension Fund's Mix Of Fair Value Investments, Audit Type, And Audit Quality Associated With The Firm's Credit Rating?, Trevor England

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

There has been a proliferation of alternative investment holdings by defined benefit pension plans during the 21^st century. While holdings of alternative investments may advantage pension plans and their sponsoring firms through diversification and/or less volatile returns, they may also present valuation problems because underlying investments in opaquely valued (or marked-to-model) securities contain larger estimation error and uncertainty. Such valuation problems may concern credit reporting agencies because the sponsoring firm’s pension plan liability is uncertain. This problem is exacerbated through agency relationships within pension plans that enable executives and investment managers to engage in opportunistic financial reporting of fair …

Data Analytics In An Audit: Examining Fraud Risk And Audit Quality, Sondra Smith

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

ABSTRACT

DATA ANALYTICS IN AN AUDIT: EXAMINING FRAUD RISK AND

AUDIT QUALITY

by

Sondra Smith

This study is comprised of two papers which examine, through interviews and an experiment, the current practices of data analytics of CPA firms, whether and how fraud risk impacts the usage of data analytics in an audit, and the effect data analytics has on the efficiency and effectiveness of an audit. The implementation of data analytics in an audit is relatively new, and there is not a good understanding of how it is currently being used in practice. Although historically the auditing profession has been …

The Relationship Between Audit Quality And Competition At The Intersection Of The Large And Small Audit Firm Markets, Jeanne-Claire Alyse White

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between audit quality and several measures of spatial competition. Spatial competition is measured as the smallest absolute difference in audit fee market shares from an audit firm and its closest competitor. In this paper, spatial competition measures are referred to as competitive distances, and they are calculated within the large audit market (Big 4 only), within the small audit market (non-Big 4 only), and between the large and small audit markets. Audit market competition and its effect on audit quality has been an ongoing debate. On one side of the argument, competition may negatively impact …

Audit-Related Services And Audit Quality: Evidence From Benefit Plan Audits, Jaclyn Prentice

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The following study examines a material but less understood component of the public audit marketplace, namely the provision of “audit-related” services to financial statement audit clients. I use the benefit plan audit service setting to examine the company and benefit plan characteristics associated with auditor selection and the impact of audit-related services on financial statement audit quality. I provide market evidence of distinct shifts in the use of the same audit firm for the financial statement audit and other audit-related services over time as well as characteristics of the choice of auditors. I then test whether having the same audit …

The Controversy Of Mandatory Audit Firm Rotation: Has Quantitative Accounting Research Misinformed Us About The Relationship Between Audit Tenure And Audit Quality?, Courtney Stern

Accounting

There is controversy between regulators and audit firms over the policy of mandatory audit firm rotation. Many regulators favor mandatory audit firm rotation whereas audit firms are against such a policy. Regulators argue that mandatory firm rotation would improve audit quality while audit firms claim that audit quality increases with audit tenure. Typically, regulators and audit firms refer to academic research that supports their position. One early paper on mandatory audit firm rotation that is commonly cited by academics and opponents of mandatory rotation is Carcello and Nagy (2004), which finds that longer audit tenure does not reduce audit quality. …

The Effect Of Audit Market Concentration On Audit Pricing And Audit Quality : The Role Of The Size Of The Audit Market, John Daniel Eshleman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The GAO has recently expressed concern that audit market concentration (i.e., not client concentration) could result in greater audit fees and lower audit quality. However, the extant literature finds that local audit markets with higher concentration have lower audit fees (Numan and Willekens 2012) and fewer accounting restatements (Newton et al. 2013). In this study, I show that the effect of audit market concentration on the level of audit fees depends on the size of the audit market (i.e., the size and/or number of clients in the local geographic area). When the audit market contains fewer clients and/or those clients …

Small Audit Firms And Earnings Manipulations, Huichi Huang

Business Administration - Dissertations

This paper examines the monitoring role of small audit firms (i.e., those with 100 or fewer clients who are subject to different levels of oversight by the PCAOB) on earnings management. Specifically, I examine the relationship between earnings manipulations and the use of small audit firms. I find that small audit firms are less able to constrain managers' opportunistic use of discretionary accruals. However I find no evidence that small audit firms are associated with real activities manipulation. By investigating a specific group of audit firms that are the smallest in the audit market, this study extends our understanding of …

Auditor Tenure And Audit Quality, Li Zheng Brooks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

I propose that audit quality is likely to increase with audit firm tenure due to a Learning Effect and decrease with audit firm tenure due to a Bonding Effect. The net impact of these two countervailing forces over audit firm tenure dictates whether the relationship between audit firm tenure and audit quality is a concave, convex, or linear function of audit firm tenure. When the Bonding Effect dominates the Learning Effect in the later (earlier) years of tenure, then audit quality is a concave (convex) function of audit firm tenure. Adopting the quadratic model to empirically estimate the audit firm …

An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Changes In Ownership Structure On Audit Quality In An Emerging Stock Market, Fang Zhang

Lingnan Theses

This study uses agency theory to test whether the demand for quality audits by listed Chinese companies is associated with changes in ownership structure, which is characterized by the dominance of the state, institutional and individual shareholders. The empirical test results obtained in a concentrated ownership setting are supportive of agency theory. Specifically, I find that the decrease of state shares and the corresponding increase of institutional shares result in a demand for higher-quality audits in China’s stock market. The results provide empirical support for the government’s recent initiative in reducing state ownership in listed companies to improve firm performance …