...Naomi R. Rothenberg ABSTRACT This paper studies how legal liability due to negligence can weaken or strengthen an auditor's reputation concerns in the client market to provide high audit effort. A negligence liability rule relies on auditing standards to provide a threshold for the level of due...

... penalty, the insurance role is perfect. When the investment is exogenous, consistent with Watts' (2003a, 2003b) argument, we find that an increase in the auditor's insurance role improves audit quality and conservatism, because conservatism helps to reduce the auditor's legal liability. However, when...