Mandatory audit firm rotation has been researched for decades with resulting opposition as well as support. Research has mainly treated mandatory auditor rotation at the firm macro level. We submit the client relationship length is comprised of firm tenure and audit team continuity, or auditor familiarity. Increased tenure, at the interorganizational or firm level and interpersonal or individual level, has been shown to increase trust; and further, trust is positively related to employee voice, such as speaking up about fraud (whistleblowing). We conduct an experiment examining whether increased audit firm tenure and auditor familiarity leads to increased trust, which enhances the willingness to whistleblow. We find evidence that suggests auditor familiarity enhances trust, which, in turn, positively influences an employee's intentions to whistleblow. This has important implications for the profession and for future research exploring mandatory audit firm rotation; in particular, the need to include auditor familiarity as a construct.

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Numerous researchers have investigated accounting students' levels of moral reasoning, ethical choice and judgment employing the Defining Issues Test (DIT) and using its P score as an indicator of moral reasoning. Not surprisingly, a number of DIT studies report conflicting results. Moreover, despite widespread use of the DIT, there is concern that it may not adequately measure all facets of ethical judgment (cf. Bailey et al., Behav Res Account 22(2):1-26, 2010). Thus, we endeavor to provide insight not only into the contradictory results but also about the applicability of the DIT for studying accounting students. To do so, we collect published and unpublished DIT studies employing accounting students as subjects and use metaanalysis to aggregate findings across these studies to quantify their results, examining commonly employed variables. We show significant relationships between P scores and some variables (length of professional experience, choice of major, political ideology, gender, GPA and education level) but not others (age). Further, our findings demonstrate that the DIT provides added insights when exploring questions of ethical choice, and ethics instruction, particularly when the instruction is embedded in an accounting course. Finally, we find that the level of DIT P scores reported in the studies relates to whether the study was published. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

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Publications in nonaccounting journals are commonly omitted in accounting faculty productivity studies, and we examine whether that omission matters. We use samples consisting of two groups of new scholars who received an accounting Ph.D. (1987/88 and 1977/78 graduates) and took tenure-track positions at U.S. universities. We combine data from multiple databases to obtain an extensive list of research publications pertaining to these individuals. During the first seven employment years, the 87/88 (77/78) Ph.D. sample published, on average, 1.95 (1.55) total research articles per scholar, including 1.38 (1.15) articles appearing in accounting journals. These findings suggest that new scholars commonly use nonaccounting journals as publication outlets, and that publication counts increase substantially when publications in both nonaccounting and accounting journals are considered. In addition, the 87/88 scholars published in nonaccounting journals more often than did the 77/78 scholars. Finally, publications in nonaccounting journals occur somewhat later in accounting scholars' careers.