We use experimental economic markets to examine the impact of changing institutional design features on audit quality. Specifically, we manipulate auditors' economic accountability to managers by altering who hires the auditor—a manager or an independent third party—and auditors' psychological accountability to investors by explicitly stating that the auditor is hired on the investors' behalf. Our design shifts auditors' accountability from managers, who have directional goal preferences, to investors, who prefer judgment accuracy. We find that removing auditors' economic accountability to managers and replacing it with psychological accountability to investors significantly increases audit quality. This increase in audit quality occurs despite the independent third party randomly hiring auditors. In an additional treatment, we incorporate auditor accuracy into the third-party hiring algorithm and find even higher audit quality. Our results suggest that altering auditors' accountability relationships can significantly enhance audit quality.
Data Availability: The laboratory market data used in this study are available from the authors upon request.
SUMMARY
We develop and test a model that anticipates detrimental performance effects in within-office distributed teams (i.e., teams based out of the same office that conduct work at different geographic locations). This setting offers a clean test of theory around distributed work because it eliminates confounding factors such as differences in culture and language. Using an experiential questionnaire we find that greater distribution is negatively associated with team communication (quality, ease, and spontaneity) and auditors' sense of shared context (access to the same information, mutual understanding, and common norms), which are in turn negatively associated with engagement performance (efficiency, commitment to excellence, overall work quality, adhering to the budget, and the team's innovative approach). Further, we find an indirect effect between distribution and performance through communication and shared context when accountability is lower, but not higher, implying that accountability interventions have the potential to aid performance quality in distributed teams.
Data Availability: Contact the authors.
In this study, we investigate the financial reporting behavior of chief financial officers (CFOs) with significant prior audit experience. Our tests indicate that, on average, CFOs who were former audit managers or partners report less aggressively than CFOs without prior audit experience. Thus, the mindset that auditors develop during their time in public accounting – which should value objective, transparent, and conservative financial reporting – appears to persist when auditors take high-level positions in industry. However, we also find that the reporting behavior of prior-auditor CFOs becomes more aggressive over time as the salience of their audit experience decays. Further, we find that audit fees are lower for clients with prior-auditor CFOs but increase as the CFOs’ time away from auditing increases. Overall, our study offers important insights regarding how audit experience is associated with the financial reporting behavior of CFOs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.