Casterella, Francis, Lewis, and Walker (CFLW 2004) find, using survey data from 1993, that (1) there is a Big 6 industry specialization audit fee premium in the small client segment of the U.S. audit market, but (2) audit fees decrease for large companies as the client becomes increasingly large relative to an auditor's clientele. In this study, we first replicate and confirm the results of CFLW (2004), using audit fee data from SEC filings for fiscal 2000 and 2001. In the post-SOX period, we find that the results related to specialization continue to hold in fiscal 2004 but not in 2003—suggesting that 2003 is perhaps a unique year due to the flux in the audit market following the enactment of SOX. With respect to client bargaining power, our results in the post-SOX period differ from CFLW (2004) in that we observe a negative association between client bargaining power and audit fees for both the small and large client segments.
The purpose of this study is to examine the association of managerial incentives and political costs with hospital financial distress, recovery or closure. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has stated that hospital closures are important for evaluating the distribution of cost, quality and access to healthcare throughout the US. Using Logistic regression, we demonstrate that hospital closure is associated with low occupancy, return on investment, asset turnover, and lack of affiliation with a multihospital system. It is also significantly associated with urban location, teaching programs, high Medicare and Medicaid patient populations, and high debt. Essential access nonprofit hospitals are less likely to close, while this does not affect governmental and for-profit hospitals. Our research hypotheses are supported by these results.
New client acceptance decisions are critical for auditors. Audit quality can be negatively affected by limited knowledge of the new client's operations and finances. This may be mitigated for auditors with industry specialization. We examine whether new clientele negatively affect audit quality at the individual level and how the association with audit quality varies across auditors with different levels of industry specialization. Our study fills a gap in the literature by directly addressing the effects of new clients on audit quality for specialist and non‐specialist auditors, as well as portfolio‐concentration experts, and sheds light on the nature of risks associated with new client acceptance decisions. We find both industry specialists and portfolio‐concentration experts can maintain their audit quality when accepting new clients, while there is a decline in quality for auditors who are neither industry specialists nor portfolio‐concentration experts.
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