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Over the past several decades, the scope of public companies' operations has become increasingly global. This has led to concern over the ability of audit firms to conduct high-quality audits across geographically dispersed foreign operations. We contribute to the growing body of research in this area by investigating the association between audit quality and local audit offices' expertise in conducting multinational audit engagements. We use two complementary measures to proxy for an audit office's multinational expertise: (1) local multinational market leadership, and (2) country-specific experience. Using a sample of multinational client firms headquartered in the United States, we consistently find that audit quality is stronger when the auditor possesses expertise conducting global group audits, possesses particular expertise in the country where a client has a significant subsidiary, or possesses both types of expertise on an engagement. Several sample partitions reinforce our main results. The results are robust to propensity score matching, as well as a placebo test using clients of the audit office that generate no foreign sales. Our evidence suggests that the challenge of conducting multinational audits is more easily met by auditors with expertise on these types of engagements. JEL Classifications: M40; M42; F23. Data Availability: All data used are publicly available.

Prior research emphasizes the centrality of audit offices in understanding auditing practices, and documents significant interoffice variation in audit outcomes based on industry expertise and office size. Our study examines how two city‐specific labor characteristics also affect audit offices and local audit markets: the city's average educational attainment, and the number of accountants in a city, which proxy for a city's human capital. Our argument draws on the urban economics literature and predicts that the level of human capital in a city is positively associated with an audit office's ability to conduct high‐quality audits. As expected, there is a positive association between audit quality (quality of audited earnings and accuracy of going‐concern reports) and average education level in the city in which the lead engagement office is located. This association is generally significant for both Big 4 and non‐Big 4 offices, but is relatively stronger for non‐Big 4 firms that are more tied to local labor markets. A company is also more likely to choose a non‐Big 4 auditor in cities with higher educational levels and relatively more accountants, and there is evidence of higher non‐Big 4 audit fees as a city's education level increases. Collectively, these results suggest that local labor characteristics affect audit offices, audit quality, and the ability of non‐Big 4 auditors to compete with Big 4 auditors in the audits of public companies.

U.S. firms recorded an unprecedented number of asset impairments during the recent financial crisis. We investigate the timing of these losses in the context of two competing views on how firms use discretion over asset impairments. The first view posits that firms record impairments to convey private information as part of their commitment to a conditionally conservative reporting strategy. The second view argues that firms use their discretion to report opportunistically by delaying the recording of bad news. Consistent with the first view, we find that firms recorded timelier asset impairments during the financial crisis if they reported more conservatively in the five years preceding the crisis. Further tests show this relation is greater for firms with strong corporate governance, industryspecialist auditors, and high leverage, indicating the importance of monitoring mechanisms in determining how firms handle the discretion involved in impairment decisions. We also test for the consequences of timely asset impairments during the financial crisis and find that firms reporting conservatively both before and during the crisis were able to acquire more debt financing, and their publicly traded bonds suffered smaller increases in illiquidity. Collectively, our study highlights the role of asset impairments in firms' accounting choices over time.

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