...Xianjie He; Jeffrey Pittman; Shuwei Sun; Donghui Wu SUMMARY Firms undertaking an initial public offering (IPO) appoint investment bankers and auditors to certify information disclosed to investors. We find that social connections significantly increase the likelihood that the bankers and auditors...

...D. James Zhang; Dennis B. Veltrop; Reggy B. H. Hooghiemstra; Floor Rink SUMMARY Audit firms rely on audit teams where memberships are frequently shared, shifted, and dissolved. In practice, this means that many auditors are part of multiple engagement teams for a given period of time. This paper...

...Padmakumar Sivadasan; Jared S. Soileau; Rui-Zhong Zhang SUMMARY We examine whether auditors helped public clients obtain U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to overcome the COVID-19-related economic crisis. Larger auditors had better access to resources to help their auditees with PPP...

...D. Jordan Lowe; Philip M. J. Reckers; Ashley K. Sauciuc SUMMARY Individuals often engage in a rationalization process to self-justify questionable conduct. However, as “gatekeepers” to the market, it is vitally important for professional auditors to avoid such practices. Recognizing that some...

...Gus De Franco; Hila Fogel-Yaari; Heather Li SUMMARY This study examines the relation between auditors and the unaudited Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A). We show that MD&As are more textually similar when firms share the same auditor. This result suggests that auditors...

...F. Todd DeZoort; Travis P. Holt; Jonathan D. Stanley SUMMARY Materiality remains a challenging concept for auditors to implement in practice. The challenges underlying auditor materiality assessments are compounded by the fact that courts, regulation, and professional standards emphasize...

...Yu Chen; John Daniel Eshleman; Jared S. Soileau SUMMARY This study examines whether a firm's business strategy influences auditor reporting. We rely on the organizational literature to develop our prediction that firms utilizing the innovative “prospector” strategy will be more likely than firms...

...Henri Guénin-Paracini; Bertrand Malsch; Marie-Soleil Tremblay SUMMARY Auditor independence, which has certainly been one of the most addressed topics in auditing literature, is a complex and ambiguous construct that can be analyzed along two dimensions. The first dimension, organizational...