时间：2019年4月12日（周五）8:30-10：00
地点：嘉庚二号楼502教室
题目：The Importance of Clients’ Social Ties to Audit Quality
报告人：王子田，澳大利亚昆士兰大学会计学高级讲师 主持人：叶建明，财务管理与会计研究院院长、教授 |
论文摘要：
Extant evidence implies that social ties between auditors and their clients undermine audit quality. We extend prior research by exploring the importance of social ties among auditors’ clients to audit quality. On one hand, social ties foster communication among clients concerning how to deal with an auditor, which puts clients in a better position to negotiate against proposed audit adjustments. On the other hand, if an auditor provides a low-quality audit to one client, then this will likely become known to their other clients via social network channels. Consequently, auditors eager to protect their valuable reputations will impose stricter external monitoring on all of their clients under this argument. In examining audit adjustment data in China to shed light on which force dominates, we find that auditors require more adjustments to earnings for a client whose audit committee members are socially connected with audit committee members of other clients. In contrast, we do not find any perceptible impact of social connections stemming from top management on auditors’ decisions to book an adjustment. Our results are consistent with the intuition that audit committees play a crucial role in ensuring reliable financial reporting, whereas top managers do not always demand accounting transparency. Accordingly, auditors’ incentives to deliver higher-quality audits are more salient when clients’ social ties arise from audit committee members, rather than top managers. Set against recent evidence that audit quality suffers when auditors and their clients are socially connected, our research provides insight on the positive impact of another form of social networks on auditor performance.
王子田博士于南洋理工大学获得会计学博士学位，曾在上海财经大学任助理教授，已在 The Accounting Review和Journal of Accounting and Economics等国际顶级期刊发表论文。