Government ownership,audit firm size and audit pricing: Evidence from China

The present study provides empirical evidence on the impact of government ownership on audit pricing behaviour based on data from Chinese listed companies between 2001 and 2008. Our findings, having controlled for auditor choice, indicate that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) incur significantly lower audit fees than non-SOEs. The results also reveal a significant interaction between the type of SOE (i.e., owned by central vs. local government) and audit firm size, which also affects audit fees. More specifically, large auditors tend to charge the central-SOEs lower audit fees than local-SOEs (province, city and county), while small auditors charge central-SOEs higher fees than local-SOEs. We explore a political economy rationale from a supply-side perspective in explaining the results.     

Audit office size,audit quality and audit pricing: evidence from small- and medium-sized enterprises

Using Swedish data, we investigate how audit quality and audit pricing vary with audit firm and office size. In contrast to prior studies, we use disciplinary sanctions issued against auditors not meeting the quality requirement as the measure of audit quality. We find no significant differences in the likelihood of sanctions between Big 4 audit firms and the fifth and sixth largest audit firms in Sweden (Grant Thornton and BDO). We refer to these collectively as ‘Top 6’. However, we find that the probabilities of warnings or exclusions from the profession are much higher for non-Top 6 auditors in Sweden than for Top 6 auditors. Furthermore, we find a strong negative association between the likelihood of sanctions and audit office size for non-Top 6 auditors. This association is insignificant for Top 6 audit firms. Audit fees follow a similar pattern and indicate that larger audit firms and offices put in more effort or have greater expertise. These results suggest that audit quality is differentiated in the private segment market. However, contrary to prior studies, our results suggest that the important dimensions are Top 6 versus non-Top 6 and the office size of non-Top 6 audit firms.     

Place attachment,audit pricing and audit quality

Place attachment is an affective bond whereby people interact with and describe themselves as belonging to specific places. This study investigates the presence of place attachment in the auditing process. Using a large sample of listed clients in China, the findings reveal that auditors are likely to charge higher fees if their colleges are located in the same cities or provinces as their clients, supporting the familiarity bias hypothesis. This effect is more concentrated among smaller auditors, non-state-owned clients, and clients who switch auditors between years. In addition, a negative relationship is found between audit quality and geographical connections between auditors and clients. Overall, the results indicate the existence of place attachment in the auditing process.     

CEO tenure and audit pricing

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We examine the relationship between CEO tenure and audit fees. After controlling for client and auditor attributes in the analyses, we find that...     

Mandatory audit partner rotation,audit market concentration,and audit quality: Evidence from China

This research examines the audit quality consequences of China's mandatory audit partner rotation (MPR) regulation, which became effective in 2004. The rule requires firms to rotate signing audit partners of audit reports every five years. We find that audit quality improves in the three years immediately following a client firm's MPR during the 2004–2011 period for a sample of 273 Chinese publicly listed firms. Specifically, we find that the improvement is most pronounced in those Chinese provinces with both low levels of audit market concentration and low levels of legal development. However, MPR does not improve audit quality in jurisdictions where legal conventions are more developed and/or where audit markets are highly concentrated with a handful of large audit firms dominating the market.     

The impact of audit committee expertise on audit quality: Evidence from UK audit fees

Governance regulators currently place great emphasis on ensuring the presence of financial expertise on audit committees (Sarbanes-Oxley, 2002; UK Corporate Governance Code 2010–2016). Underlying this is a belief that greater expertise enhances the effectiveness of audit committees and, by extension, the quality of the external audit. This study investigates the impact of audit committee expertise on one measure of audit quality - audit fees paid by FTSE350 companies. Our analysis finds that audit committees possessing greater levels of financial expertise are associated with higher audit fees. When we segregate financial expertise between accounting and non-accounting, we find that the positive impact identified is driven by non-accounting expertise. Furthermore, when we separate FTSE100 and FTSE250 firms we find the impact of financial expertise is confined to FTSE250 firms. Our findings are important as they highlight the usefulness of segregating financial expertise between specialists and non-specialists, something which regulators in the UK and in the USA currently do not do. Our findings also highlight the potential value of audit committee expertise in smaller as opposed to larger listed firms, suggesting that the value of expertise to audit quality depends on the specific financial reporting challenges firms face.     

International capital asset pricing: Evidence from options

We study the risk dynamics and pricing in international economies through a joint analysis of the time-series returns and option prices on three equity indexes underlying three economies: the S&P 500 Index of the United States, the FTSE 100 Index of the United Kingdom, and the Nikkei-225 Stock Average of Japan. We develop an international capital asset pricing model, under which the return on each equity index is decomposed into two orthogonal jump-diffusion components: a global component and a country-specific component. We apply separate stochastic time changes to the two components so that stochastic volatility can come from both global and country-specific risks. For each economy, we assign separate market prices for the two return risk components and the two volatility risk components. Under this specification, we obtain tractable option pricing solutions. Model estimation reveals several interesting insights. First, global and country-specific return and volatility risks show different dynamics. Global return movements contain a larger discontinuous component, and global return volatility is more persistent than the country-specific counterparts. Second, investors charge positive prices for global return risk and negative prices for volatility risk, suggesting that investors are willing to pay positive premiums to hedge against downside global return movements and upside volatility movements. Third, the three economies contain different risk profiles and also price risks differently. Japan contains the largest idiosyncratic risk component and smallest global risk component. Investors in the Japanese market also price more heavily against future volatility increases than against future market downfalls.     

The asset pricing effects of UK market liquidity shocks: Evidence from tick data

Using tick data covering a 12 year period including much of the recent financial crisis we provide an unprecedented examination of the relationship between liquidity and stock returns in the UK market. Previous research on liquidity using high frequency data omits the recent financial crisis and is focused on the US, which has a different market structure to the UK. We first construct several microstructure liquidity measures for FTSE All Share stocks, demonstrating that tick data reveal patterns in intra-day liquidity not observable with lower frequency daily data. Our asymptotic principal component analysis captures commonality in liquidity across stocks to construct systematic market liquidity factors. We find that cross-sectional differences in returns exist across portfolios sorted by liquidity risk. These are strongly robust to market, size and value risk. The inclusion of a momentum factor partially explains some of the liquidity premia but they remain statistically significant. However, during the crisis period a long liquidity risk strategy experiences significantly negative alphas.     

Mutual fund herding and audit pricing

This study investigates how investor trading behavior affects audit pricing by examining mutual fund herding in specific. When mutual fund managers herd due to information cascade, mimicking incentive, or agency problem, it causes information friction and weakens their monitoring effectiveness. Heightened governance risk is associated with higher audit risk and thus higher audit pricing. In our empirical tests, we find that herding weakens mutual funds’ information advantage and monitoring effectiveness, ultimately resulting in higher audit fees. To mitigate the endogeneity concern, we employ the natural experiment of the 2004 SEC regulation change on mutual fund disclosure frequency to capture exogenous change in herding intensity. Our findings are robust using propensity score matching method and alternative measures. Consistent with our conjecture, we document that firms facing stronger mutual fund herding are associated with deteriorated corporate disclosure quality.     

The real effects of bank distress: Evidence from bank bailouts in Germany

How does bank distress impact their customers' probability of default and trade credit availability? We address this question by looking at a unique sample of German firms from 2000 to 2011. We follow their firm-bank relationships through times of distress and crisis, featuring the different transmission of bank distress shocks into already weakened firm balance sheets. We find that a distressed bank bailout, which is subject to restructuring and deleveraging conditions, leads to a bank-induced increase of firms' probabilities of default. Moreover, bailouts tend to reduce trade credit availability and ultimately firms' sales. We further find that the direction and magnitude of the effects depends on firm quality and the relationship orientation of banks.     

Internal control risk and audit fees: Evidence from China

This study examines the association between internal control risk and audit fees under the voluntary adopting regime of the Basic Standard of Enterprise Internal Control in China. We find that audit fees are positively related to disclosed internal control weaknesses (ICWs). In particular, they are significantly associated with non-financial reporting-related, but not with financial reporting-related, ICWs.Our results also indicate that voluntary assurance in internal control reports can mitigate higher audit fees associated with ICWs. Our study provides timely evidence relating to the debate on whether the scope of internal control should be expanded to non-financial reporting-related areas.     

Capital requirements and mortgage pricing: Evidence from Basel II

As a result of the Basel II reforms, capital requirements on UK mortgages fell substantially in coincidence with the financial crisis. We exploit a novel, loan-level dataset on within-lender variation in risk-weighted capital requirements and a triple-difference identification strategy to estimate the pass through of capital requirements to mortgage rates. We find that a 1pp lower risk-weighted capital requirement leads to a reduction in rates by 10–16bp on average, with stronger effects for less-capitalized lenders. The competitive advantage induced by multi-tier regulation also affects the composition of banks mortgage portfolios, with larger lenders specializing in lower risk loans. Finally, our results support the use of countercyclical capital requirements to sustain lending in a crisis.     

The effect of political visibility on audit effort and audit pricing

This study examines whether auditors adjust their effort and pricing decisions for political visibility. We argue, from the behavioural literature, that political visibility will create the need for more justification by auditors. Using data on actual audit fees, hours and billing rates for a sample of New Zealand public sector companies, we find that total audit fees are positively related to the number of press mentions (our proxy for political visibility). Consistent with our expectations we find that audit fees are monotonically related to audit fees. We also find that auditors increase the hours spent on the audit but not billing rates, which further suggests defensive bolstering by auditors.     

The impact of PCAOB international registration on audit quality and audit fees: Evidence from China

Despite the importance of registration with the PCAOB, there is surprisingly little academic research on the registration process and its impact on audit outcomes (Abernathy et al., 2013). The PCAOB allows registration of audit firms from non-US countries. However, China and a few other countries do not allow the PCAOB to conduct inspections of audit firms. We take advantage of this setting to investigate whether PCAOB-registered audit firms improve audit quality in the absence of inspections and whether they charge an audit fee premium. Our findings indicate that audit quality increases following PCAOB registration and that clients pay higher audit fees for audits by PCAOB-registered firms.     

Audit pricing and nature of controlling shareholders: Evidence from France

This study examines whether auditors are employed as a monitoring mechanism to mitigate agency problems arising from different types of controlling shareholders. In a context of concentrated ownership and poor investor protection, controlling shareholders can easily expropriate wealth from minority shareholders and profit from private benefits of control. However, this agency conflict has been rarely studied, as the most commonly assumed agency conflict occurs between managers and shareholders. Using an audit fee model derived from Simunic (1980), we study the impact of the nature of controlling shareholders on audit fees in French listed firms. Our results show: (1) a negative relationship between audit fees and government shareholdings; (2) a positive relationship between audit fees and institutional shareholdings; and (3) no relationship between audit fees and family shareholdings. These results illustrate the mixed effects of the nature of ownership on audit fees.     

R&D capitalization and audit fees: Evidence from China

Our study investigates the association between capitalized R&D costs and audit fees and whether this association reflects the effect of earnings management. By exploring Chinese listed firms, we find that capitalized R&D costs are positively associated with audit fees, where such positive association holds for both the discretionary and nondiscretionary portions of capitalized R&D costs. Moreover, the positive association between the discretionary portion of capitalized R&D costs and audit fees is more pronounced for firms with stronger incentives to manipulate earnings. Overall, our findings imply that firms' reporting incentives affect how auditors react to clients' accounting choices. This in turn suggests that auditors believe some firms capitalize R&D to manipulate earnings, and the resulting earnings-management concerns lead them to charge higher fees.     

The vanishing searches and audit fees: Evidence from Google's withdrawal from China

I investigate the impact of the disruption of free information access via search engines on audit fees using a quasi-natural experiment provided by Google's withdrawal from China. Employing a difference-in-differences design, I document an increase in audit fees for firms with overseas business relative to firms without overseas business after Google's withdrawal. The results are robust to matched samples, placebo tests, alternative specifications, excluding alternative explanations and different event windows. This trend in audit fees suggests that Google's withdrawal hampers firms' foreign information streams and increases audit risk and audit effort. Consistent with this argument, after Google's withdrawal, firms with overseas business conduct more earnings management, pay more abnormal audit fees and experience longer audit report lags. Furthermore, the increase in audit fees is greater for firms with poor information environments, more retail investors or non-Big 4 auditors. My findings suggest a potential auditing cost of restricting the free flow of public foreign information about firms.     

Diagnosing affine models of options pricing: Evidence from VIX

Affine jump-diffusion models have been the mainstream in options pricing because of their analytical tractability. Popular affine jump-diffusion models, however, are still unsatisfactory in describing the options data and the problem is often attributed to the diffusion term of the unobserved state variables. Using prices of variance-swaps (i.e., squared VIX) implied from options prices, we provide fresh evidence regarding the misspecification of affine jump-diffusion models, as variance-swap prices are affine functions of the state variables in a broader class of models that do not restrict the diffusion term of the state variables. We apply the nonparametric methodology used by Aït-Sahalia (1996b), supplemented with bootstrap tests and other parametric tests, to the S&P 500 index options data from January 1996 to September 2008. We find that, while the affine diffusion term of the state variables may contribute to the misspecification as the literature has suggested, the affine drift of the state variables, jump intensities, and risk premiums are also sources of misspecification.     

Corporate Governance and Expected Stock Returns: Evidence from Germany

Recent empirical work shows evidence for higher valuation of firms in countries with a better legal environment. We investigate whether differences in the quality of firm‐level corporate governance also help to explain firm performance in a cross‐section of companies within a single jurisdiction. Constructing a broad corporate governance rating (CGR) for German public firms, we document a positive relationship between governance practices and firm valuation. There is also evidence that expected stock returns are negatively correlated with firm‐level corporate governance, if dividend yields are used as proxies for the cost of capital. An investment strategy that bought high‐CGR firms and shorted low‐CGR firms earned abnormal returns of around 12% on an annual basis during the sample period.     

Dividends,Taxes, and Signaling: Evidence from Germany

The higher taxation of dividends in the United States gave rise to theories that explain why companies pay dividends. Tax-based signaling models propose that the higher tax on dividends is a necessary condition to make them informative about companies' values. In Germany, where dividends are not tax-disadvantaged and in fact are taxed lower for most investor classes, these models predict that dividends are not informative. However, we find that the stock price reaction to dividend news in Germany is similar to that found in the United States. This suggests other reasons, beyond taxation, that make dividends informative.