Responsiveness of Auditors to the Audit Risk Standards: Unique Evidence from Big 4 Audit Firms

We examine the effect of changes in audit risk standards on the conduct of financial statement audits in a European setting. We investigate this by analysing the audit hours and audit fees for clients of Big 4 audit firms in Finland in 1996 and 2010. Our results show that audit firms became more sensitive to clients’ business risk due to the introduction of the new audit risk standards, with more audit hours allocated to owner-managed companies in 2010 than in 1996, and fewer audit hours allocated to low-risk clients in 2010 than in 1996. Also, the labour mix in the audit team changed for owner-managed companies, with a greater work load carried by junior auditors in 2010 than in 1996. Regarding the price of audit, we find an increase in audit fees for clients with high business risk, while audit fees remained at roughly the same level for low-risk clients. These findings should be of interest to the auditing profession and those involved in the development of auditing regulations.     

Annual report readability and corporate agency costs

Annual reports are the main sources of information for outside investors’ investment decisions and enable shareholders to supervise the management. Difficulties with the readability of these reports may therefore have serious consequences. Using 19,221 firm-year observations of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2001 to 2015, we investigate the association between annual report readability and corporate agency costs, where readability is proxied by report file length and/or file size. We find that firms with better annual report readability experience lower agency costs, and the negative association between readability and agency costs is more pronounced in firms with higher external audit quality, internal control quality or analyst coverage. These results hold after several robustness checks. The positive effect of annual report readability is stronger in private firms than in state-owned enterprises, and becomes stronger after the implementation of new accounting standards in 2007. Readable annual reports can help in monitoring corporate insiders’ opportunistic behavior and thus reduce agency costs.     

推行精细化管理 提高内部审计效能

全面推行工程项目精细化管理,对于建筑施工企业的发展具有重大的意义,随着精细化管理逐步展开,对内部审计工作也提出了更为严格的要求。     

市政工程造价预结算审核要点与解决对策

在市政工程造价管理和质量控制过程中,相关单位必须重视预结算审核工作,即严格按照我国相关法律法规和相关要求,对预结算加以全面核算,及时发现预结算中存在的问题,且严格监控整个市政工程的建设过程,对市政工程进行科学合理的目标管理,从而有效保证市政工程建设的正常开展。本文主要阐述市政工程造价预结算审核要点,并结合存在的问题提出切实可行的解决对策。     

Balance sheet conservatism and audit reporting conservatism

Financial reports are prepared on a going‐concern (GC) basis rather than a liquidation basis even when companies are highly distressed. This allows distressed companies to report book values of assets that greatly exceed their liquidation values, implying a lack of conservatism in the balance sheet. We argue that auditors issue going‐concern opinions in order to warn investors about this lack of balance sheet conservatism. This argument leads to two testable hypotheses. First, for companies that are at risk of bankruptcy, auditors are more likely to issue GC opinions when the book values of assets under the GC assumption are high relative to the expected liquidation values of assets (i.e., when the GC assumption causes the balance sheet to lack conservatism). Second, for companies that enter bankruptcy, the issuance of a prior GC opinion has predictive information content with respect to the wedge between the book values of assets and the future liquidation values of those same assets. Our results strongly support both hypotheses. The findings are important because they indicate that conservative audit reporting helps to compensate for a lack of conservatism in the balance sheet, which arises because the GC assumption permits the book values of assets to exceed their liquidation values.     

The Unintended Consequences of the Frequency of PCAOB Inspection

After more than 50 years of self‐regulation of the US auditing profession, the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) as a quasi‐governmental entity with statutory authority to inspect accounting firms that audit public clients. The frequency of this inspection is annual or triennial, based upon the number of public clients the firm audits. We examine the effects of these two levels of inspection frequency on financial reporting quality and audit fees for clients of small and midsize public accounting firms. Our findings provide evidence of significantly higher audit quality and audit fees for clients of annually inspected firms relative to clients of triennially inspected firms. These findings are robust to auditor‐client alignment analyses, propensity score matching, time‐series analyses, examination of firms that have changed from triennial to annual inspection, and particular examination of firms with inspection deficiencies. Overall, our study suggests that the two‐tier frequency system of PCAOB inspection may have also resulted in two‐tier audit quality and audit fee systems for small and midsize public accounting firms, with more frequent inspection leading to more rigorous and informed auditor decisions. We discuss the implications of our results for the Board and the profession at large.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EXPORT STATUS AND PRODUCTIVITY IN SERVICES: A FIRM‐LEVEL ANALYSIS FOR SPAIN

This paper analyses the relationship between export status and productivity in a major service exporter, Spain, during 2001–07. I find that exporters in the services sector are 45 percent more productive than non‐exporters. This productivity premium is larger for firms that supply non‐internet‐related services than for firms that supply internet‐related services. The results show that exporters were more productive than non‐exporters before beginning to export, and also that exporting increases productivity growth; however, this positive shock vanishes quickly.     

论英美法系国家的展示性证据

英美法系的展示性证据是一种有形证据,但不是一种实际存在的证据或事实,而是一种解说性证据,或者说律师用来提高举证说服力的证明方法。在法庭中使用展示性证据可以使自己的思想更容易被审理者理解和接受,尤其当涉及复杂的、技术性、科学性、数值性的案件。展示性证据包括图表、照片、摘要、模型、录像资料、事件的重建和演示等类型。展示性证据在开场陈述和结案陈词中都被律师广泛运用。     

Board Committees in Corporate Governance: A Cross‐Disciplinary Review and Agenda for the Future

The importance of board committees – specialized subgroups that exist to perform many of the board's most critical functions, such as setting executive compensation, identifying potential board members, and overseeing financial reporting – has grown over time due to increased legal requirements and greater complexity of the environment in which firms operate. This has resulted in a large body of work examining board committees across the accounting, finance, and management disciplines. However, this research has developed rather independently within each discipline, preventing scholars and practitioners from developing a comprehensive understanding of board committees. To address this issue, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature that: 1) summarizes and synthesizes antecedents and outcomes associated with board committees in publicly‐traded firms in English common law countries; and 2) offers a critical analysis of existing research, providing recommendations for advancements and new directions in board committee research.     

高管机会主义品行与公司信息披露决策

文章构建相应策略识别了高管机会主义品行，并探究其对公司信息披露决策的影响。研究结果表明，高管的机会主义品行会显著增加公司信息披露违规、真实盈余管理行为；提升公司选择非国际“四大”会计师事务所的概率，并支付更高的审计费用。随着高管机会主义水平上升，公司更有可能作出上述决策。进一步地，国有产权能在一定程度上抑制高管机会主义品行对信息披露质量的负面影响，却显著增加了公司应计盈余管理；当高管机会主义水平较高时，国有产权也无法发挥有效治理作用。从经济后果看，高管的机会主义品行能被资本市场识别，并显著减损公司未来价值。