{"title":"Partner wealth and audit quality: evidence from the United States","authors":"John Xuefeng Jiang, Shaohua He, K. Philip Wang","doi":"10.1007/s11142-024-09828-6","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Using the market values of audit partners’ houses as a measure of their personal wealth, we find that wealthier U.S. partners provide higher-quality audits, as evidenced by fewer material restatements, fewer material SEC comment letters, and higher audit fees. A battery of falsification tests shows that these findings are not driven by the matching of wealthier partners with clients with higher financial reporting quality. Our additional analyses suggest two explanations: greater personal wealth both incentivizes partners to exert more effort in delivering high-quality audits and reveals partners’ audit competence.</p>","PeriodicalId":48120,"journal":{"name":"Review of Accounting Studies","volume":"83 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Review of Accounting Studies","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-024-09828-6","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Using the market values of audit partners’ houses as a measure of their personal wealth, we find that wealthier U.S. partners provide higher-quality audits, as evidenced by fewer material restatements, fewer material SEC comment letters, and higher audit fees. A battery of falsification tests shows that these findings are not driven by the matching of wealthier partners with clients with higher financial reporting quality. Our additional analyses suggest two explanations: greater personal wealth both incentivizes partners to exert more effort in delivering high-quality audits and reveals partners’ audit competence.
期刊介绍:
Review of Accounting Studies provides an outlet for significant academic research in accounting including theoretical, empirical, and experimental work. The journal is committed to the principle that distinctive scholarship is rigorous. While the editors encourage all forms of research, it must contribute to the discipline of accounting. The Review of Accounting Studies is committed to prompt turnaround on the manuscripts it receives. For the majority of manuscripts the journal will make an accept-reject decision on the first round. Authors will be provided the opportunity to revise accepted manuscripts in response to reviewer and editor comments; however, discretion over such manuscripts resides principally with the authors. An editorial revise and resubmit decision is reserved for new submissions which are not acceptable in their current version, but for which the editor sees a clear path of changes which would make the manuscript publishable. Officially cited as: Rev Account Stud