While substantial revisions to auditor reporting requirements are being implemented internationally, the impact of these reforms on financial reporting quality is unknown. We exploit the United Kingdom's recent auditor reporting changes and find that the United Kingdom's new reporting regime is associated with an improvement in financial reporting quality as proxied by significant decreases in absolute abnormal accruals and the propensity to just meet or beat analyst forecasts, and a significant increase in earnings response coefficients. As for audit costs, we do not find a significant change in audit fees or audit delay surrounding the implementation of the new reporting regime. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that new auditor reporting requirements are associated with a significant improvement in financial reporting quality without detecting a significant increase in audit costs.

The PCAOB recently considered implementing mandatory audit firm rotation in hopes of better aligning auditors' interests with investors' interests, suggesting that the PCAOB views long auditor tenure as problematic. However, the accounting profession argues that long tenure actually improves audit quality. This study provides insight into investors' views by evaluating the market's reaction to events related to the potential adoption of rotation that occurred between 2011 and 2013. The results provide some evidence that the market reacts negatively (positively) to events that increased (decreased) the likelihood of rotation, although these results are sensitive to the market index used to calculate abnormal returns. More importantly, particularly given the lack of a U.S.-specific control group, cross-sectional tests provide strong evidence that the market reaction is more negative (positive) on dates that increased (decreased) the likelihood of rotation given longer auditor tenure. Moreover, we also find that the market reaction is more negative (positive) on dates that increased (decreased) the likelihood of rotation given a Big 4 auditor. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the text.

No abstract

The elimination of goodwill amortization in 2001 brought about significant change in how companies are required to account for goodwill. This change in accounting also brought with it new challenges for auditors, namely evaluating the reasonableness of management's assumptions related to goodwill valuation. In addition to introducing technical challenges, this task is particularly difficult given the misalignment in incentives it creates between managers who likely prefer to avoid recording an impairment and auditors who seek to minimize the bias in management's impairment testing. This study focuses on the consequences of the misaligned incentives that auditors face under the current goodwill assessment process. We find that the decision to record a goodwill impairment is associated with an increase in the probability of auditor dismissal. Consistent with the presence of significant friction with clients, our results also indicate that the likelihood of auditor dismissals is negatively related to the favorability of the impairment decision. Furthermore, we find that companies impairing goodwill prior to dismissing auditors subsequently employ auditors that are, on average, more favorable to clients in their impairment decisions.

No abstract