SUMMARY This paper provides an empirical examination of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) assurance market in the United States. Various constituencies have found this market puzzling, as the level of assurance significantly lags international levels (Simnett et al. 2009; KPMG 2011). Results shed light on this enigma by demonstrating that, unlike their international counterparts, U.S. finance and utilities firms are not more likely (than firms in other industries) to obtain CSR assurance despite facing significant social and environmental risks. As these industries are highly regulated in the United States, regulatory oversight may be acting as a substitute for CSR assurance. We also find that highly leveraged firms are less likely to obtain CSR assurance, potentially due to stringent bank monitoring indirectly suppressing demand. Nonetheless, examining the capital market responses to CSR assurance makes the low demand even more puzzling. Specifically, CSR assurance is associated with lower cost of equity capital along with lower analyst forecast errors and dispersion. Furthermore, the reductions in cost-of-capital and forecast dispersion are significantly higher when CSR assurance is provided by an accounting firm. These results have implications for companies that are considering CSR assurance and accounting firms in developing and marketing their CSR assurance services.

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Audit practitioners, academics, and attorneys have expressed concern that disclosing critical audit matters (CAMs) will increase jurors' auditor liability judgments when auditors fail to detect misstatements. In contrast, this study provides theory and experimental evidence that CAM disclosures, under certain conditions, reduce auditor liability judgments as jurors perceive that undetected fraudulent misstatements were more foreseeable to the plaintiff (i.e., the financial statement user suing the auditor). However, we find that CAM disclosures only reduce auditor liability for undetected misstatements that, absent CAM disclosure, are relatively difficult to foresee. Finally, CAM disclosures that are unrelated to subsequent misstatements neither increase nor reduce auditor liability judgments relative to the current regime (i.e., where CAMs are not disclosed), but reduce liability judgments relative to reporting that there were no CAMs. As such, we find that, relative to stating there were no CAMs, disclosure of any CAM (i.e., related or unrelated) provides litigation protection in cases of undetected fraud. Consequently, the CAM requirement could incentivize auditors to disclose innocuous boilerplate CAMs, thereby diluting the impact of more warranted CAM disclosures. Data Availabliity: Available from authors upon request.

Online labor markets allow rapid recruitment of large numbers of workers for very low pay. Although online workers are often used as research participants, there is little evidence that they are motivated to make costly choices to forgo wealth or leisure that are often central to addressing accounting research questions. Thus, we investigate the validity of using online workers as a proxy for non-experts when accounting research designs use more demanding tasks than these workers typically complete. Three experiments examine the costly choices of online workers relative to student research participants. We find that online workers are at least as willing as students to make costly choices, even at significantly lower wages. We also find that online workers are sensitive to performance-based wages, which are just as effective in inducing high effort as high fixed wages. We discuss implications of our results for conducting accounting research with online workers. Data Availability: Contact the authors.