This study examines how the legal and regulatory changes in China affect the relationship between client economic importance and audit quality. At the individual auditor level, we find that the propensity to issue modified audit opinions (MAOs) is negatively correlated with client importance from 1995 to 2000. However, from 2001 to 2004, when the institutional environment became more investor-friendly, the propensity to issue MAOs is positively associated with client importance. These findings are corroborated by an analysis of regulatory sanctions. Although client importance measured at the office level is also negatively related to the propensity for MAOs from 1995 to 2000 without controlling for the auditor-level client importance, this result is sensitive to model specification and sample composition. Our results suggest that (1) institutional improvements prompt auditors to prioritize the costs of compromising quality over the economic benefits gained from important clients; and (2) the impact of client importance on audit decisions appears to be different at the individual auditor and office levels.

This study examines whether audit quality in the Shanghai Stock Exchange affects the positive association between change in earnings per share and cumulative abnormal return (CAR). Regression results using 659 Shanghai listed company observations in 1996 and 1997 show that the positive market reaction to increase in earnings is stronger for$rms audited by high quality auditors. A broad conclusion of thestudy is that audit quality is playing an important role in China and that investors in the Shanghai market diyerentiate between high quality versus low quality auditors.