事务所变更的“年报形式质量之谜”及其经济后果--基于模板化披露的经验证据

现有研究对于事务所变更在企业信息披露质量中发挥的作用尚存争论,“治理假说”和“合谋假说”分别认为事务所变更会提高和降低年扌艮质量。现有文献多聚焦于财务信息的内容质量,而对非财务信息形式质量的研究较为缺乏。本文从年报模板化视角考察事务所变更对年报形式质量的影响发现:会计事务所变更后,公司年报模板化程度相较上年显著上升,且在因非正常因素发生变更、存在较强高管自利动机下更明显,说明“合谋假说”占主导;事务所变更与年报模糊化程度的关系在四大变更为非“四大”、高行业竞争度以及高审计费用溢价的公司中更显著;事务所变更后年报模板化披露会损害企业价值。本文研究结论为监管部门有效监督事务所变更后的审计质量提供了经验参考。

The Mystery of the Annual Report Form Quality due to Auditor Switch and Its Economic Consequences--Empirical evidence based on templated disclosure

Existing empirical research has not reached a consensus on how auditor switch affects the information disclosure quality.The governance hypothesis and the collusion hypothesis suggest that auditor switch can improve and reduce the quality of annual reports respectively.However,the previous research focuses on the content quality of financial information,and touches little on the form quality of non-financial information.This paper examines the impact of auditor switch on the form quality of annual reports from the perspective of templated annual reports.We find that after the firm switches its accounting firm,the degree of annual report templating increases significantly compared with the previous year,and becomes higher under the circumstances of abnormal factors and a strong motivation for executives to pursue self interests,which indicates that the collusion hypothesis dominates.The above effect is more significant in firms which switch their accounting firms from Big 4 to non-Big 4,with stronger industry competition and higher audit fee premium.The templated disclosure of the annual report after the change of the accounting firms damages the corporate value.The research conclusions provide an empirical reference for the supervisory departments to effectively monitor the quality after the auditor switch.