Corporate Governance, Conservatism and Auditor Resignation

Abstract

This paper studies the influence of conditional conservatism on the auditor resignations, and more importantly, the impact of corporate governance on this relationship. The existing literature has provided evidence on the existence and pervasiveness of accounting conservatism, such as compensation and debt contracts, shareholder litigation, taxation and accounting supervision. However, there is very limited evidence and discussion on the potential impact of accounting conservatism on audit risk and auditor resignation. Furthermore, research on how effective corporate governance affects the relationship is rarely covered. We select the firm-year observations from 2005 to 2015. We find that the conditional conservatism reduces the auditor resignations by reducing the expected audit risk. However, further empirical results show that this reduction in auditor resignations is attenuated by higher corporate governance quality. That is, effective corporate governance will moderate the negative correlation between conservatism and auditor resignations. The empirical results of this paper are of value to firms, auditors, regulators, standard-setters and corporate managers. In addition, this paper expands the literature on the influencing factors of auditor resignations.