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The publication of the European Commission Green Paper, "Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis" in October 2010, has stirred up a lively debate on the role of joint audits. This literature review identifies and evaluates, for the benefit of future research and regulators, existing evidence about joint audits. We find limited empirical support to suggest that joint audits lead to increased audit quality, but some empirical support to suggest that joint audits lead to additional costs. Overall, this paper indicates that joint audit should be seen as a mechanism that is embedded in a broader institutional context, and not be considered in isolation from other factors that might impact the audit market. The results indicate that various country-level characteristics are simultaneously at play. While joint audits can potentially enhance the audit market competition by allowing smaller audit firms to maintain larger market shares, the related impact on audit quality has not yet been clearly demonstrated and thus provides a promising avenue for future research.3

As standard-setting and regulation take place in an increasingly transnational and multilingual context, accounting concepts travel across borders and languages. On a global scale, the transnational standards originally written in the English language are ultimately translated into financial statements prepared in dozens of different languages. When regulatory texts such as accounting standards are initially drafted, accounting facts are constructed in the regulation process by labelling particular matters with either newly coined or existing accounting terms (Gröjer, 2001; Hines, 1988; Young, 2003). Thereafter, accounting standards are translated into other languages. Despite the rise and

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European Commission (EC 2011) has recently suggested joint audit -broadly defined as an audit where two independent auditors are jointly liable for the audit report -as a way a way to increase audit quality after the financial crisis and to mitigate audit market concentration, by enlarging the audit offer. Big 4 audit firms have fought this proposal by arguing its unbearable cost while 2 nd Tier audit firms have supported it by arguing its added quality. This conflicting position leads us to question their claim of public interest concern. As group-interest economic regulation theories predict that the absence of any effect of a new regulation (here: joint audit) is an evidence of a group rather than a public-interest concern, we test both cost and quality arguments. We perform our main analysis on Denmark (2002Denmark ( -2010, which gave up the mandatory joint audit in 2005. We test the impact of joint audit on both audit costs proxied by audit fees or total fees and audit quality proxied by abnormal accruals. Our results confirm 1) the nonsignificance association between fees (either audit fees or total fees) and joint audit, and 2) the non-significance association between abnormal accrual and joint audit. We then apply the same approach on a matched French-German sample to assess the arguments based on the French case, as France is characterized by a long tradition of joint audit. We find 1) similar results for audit quality (no significant differences between both countries regarding abnormal accrual in France); and 2) higher fees (audit fees and total fees) in France. However, as given the impossibility to disentangle the effect of joint audit from other institutional differences (as for instance the ban of joint provision of audit and non-audit services in France), we conclude that any argument based on the French case only is dubious. As given the non significance of the hypothesized positive association between joint audit and audit cost or quality, we conclude that arguments raised by both parties relate more to the defense of their private interest than the public (firms or shareholders") interests. The results are of interest for regulators and actors in the audit market.

This paper describes experiences gained from the implementation and evaluation of an XML‐based integration system in a real case. The prototype was designed to support electronic data exchange in a supply chain. The purpose of the prototype was to study the properties of the integration system from both a development and usage perspective. In particular, the study outlined how and in which circumstances XML facilitates supply chain integration. EDI provided a point of comparison. This information is useful both for the developers and users of integration systems.

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