Decomposition of Fraud‐Risk Assessments and Auditors' Sensitivity to Fraud Cues*

Practitioners and regulators are concerned that when auditors perceive management's attitude or character as indicative of low fraud risk, they are not sufficiently sensitive to high levels of incentive or opportunity risks in their overall fraud‐risk assessments. In this study, we examine whether a fraud‐triangle decomposition of fraud‐risk assessments (that is, separately assessing attitude, opportunity, and incentive risks prior to assessing overall fraud risk) increases auditors' sensitivity to opportunity and incentive cues when perceptions of management's attitude suggest low fraud risk. In an experiment with 52 practicing audit managers, we find that auditors who decompose fraud‐risk assessments are more sensitive to opportunity and incentive cues when making their overall assessments than auditors who simply make an overall fraud‐risk assessment. However, this increased sensitivity to opportunity and incentive cues appears to happen only when those cues suggest low fraud risk. When opportunity and incentive cues suggest high fraud risk, auditors are equally sensitive to those cues whether they use a decomposition or a holistic approach. We discuss and examine potential explanations for this finding.     

Hours of Part-Time and Full-Time Workers at the Same Firm

Nearly half of all firms hire both part-time and full-time workers. This note uses the results of a unique survey of more than 5,000 establishments to examine the ratio of part-time weekly hours to full-time weekly hours at firms employing both types of worker. The distribution of relative hours appears fairly stable across industries, Regression analysis shows that higher quasi-fixed labor costs increase the ratio of part-time to full-time hours, although the effect is empirically small.     

Home Bias, Foreign Mutual Fund Holdings, and the Voluntary Adoption of International Accounting Standards

We test the assertion that a consequence of voluntarily adopting International Accounting Standards (IAS) is the enhanced ability to attract foreign capital. Using a unique database that reports firm‐level holdings of over 25,000 mutual funds from around the world, our multivariate tests find that average foreign mutual fund ownership is significantly higher among IAS adopters. We also find that IAS adopters in poorer information environments and with lower visibility have higher levels of foreign investment, consistent with firms using IAS adoption to provide more information and/or information in a more familiar form to foreign investors. Taken together, our findings are consistent with voluntary IAS adoption reducing home bias among foreign investors and thereby improving capital allocation efficiency.     

Credit Losses in Australasian Banking

We analyse the determinants of bank credit losses in Australasia. Despite sizeable credit losses over the past two decades, ours is the first systematic study to do so. Analysis is based on a comprehensive dataset retrieved from original financial reports of 32 Australasian banks (1980–2005). Credit losses rise when the macro economy is weak. Asset markets, particularly the equity market, are also important. Larger banks provide more for credit losses while banks with high cost-income-ratios show greater loan loss provisions. Strong loan growth translates into significantly higher credit losses with a lag of 2–4 years. Finally, the results show strong evidence of income smoothing activities by banks.